Between the Stage and the Staging Docks

Defeated at the battle of Vertières on November 18, 1803, French commander-in-chief General Donatien-Marie-Joseph Rochambeau negotiated a withdrawal of his troops from the island. This was not an official surrender; as Julia Gaffield notes, the French continued to “claim to be the legal authorities” even after the victors declared independence on January 1, 1804.Footnote ¹ Some 2,000 French troops led by General Jean-Louis Ferrand removed to Santo Domingo, followed by “thousands of civilians from various parts of Saint-Domingue” who “bided their time in anticipation of a new French expedition.”Footnote ² In this context, the presence in Haitian cities of French people – many of them likely supporters of Ferrand – made for a volatile situation, in which theater played an unexpected part.

Mere weeks into Haitian independence, in January 1804, civilian Frenchmen escaped from the southern Haitian city of Jérémie, boarding an English frigate remaining in the harbor.Footnote ³ Among them was a French-born officer named Raynal,Footnote ⁴ who had officially become Haitian on defecting from the French expeditionary corps and joining General Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s Indigenous Army. On the occasion of a theatrical performance,Footnote ⁵ he ordered the soldiers usually in charge of customs duties to act as a police force at the Jérémie playhouse instead, allowing him and his accomplices to get on board undetected. On noticing the escape, General Laurent Férou – commander at Jérémie – demanded from English ship captain John Perkins the return of Raynal, so he could be court-martialed.Footnote ⁶ Perkins refused. In need of water but forced by circumstances to avoid Jérémie, he resorted to sending sailors to shore in an area closed to foreigners, where they were arrested. In exchange for their safe return, Perkins surrendered Raynal to Férou, who had him executed for treason.

The episode bolstered the suspicions of Haitians toward Frenchmen in their midst and fueled rumors that a conspiracy to foment revolt against the new authorities was afoot; all in turn contributed to the new Governor-General Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s order to resume war against the French remaining in Haiti that February. In his Proclamation of April 28, 1804, Dessalines justified the order to execute Frenchmen with this question: “Shall I again recall to your memory the plots lately framed at Jérémie – the terrible explosion that was to be the result, notwithstanding the generous pardon granted to these incorrigible beings at the expulsion of the French army?”Footnote ⁷ The executions soon became fodder for hostile arguments against the fledgling country but, according to Beaubrun Ardouin, Dessalines did not think they would hamper Haiti’s economic prospects: “In the customs house, if you hang a white man to one arm of the scale and put a bag of coffee on the other side, other whites will come and buy that coffee without paying any attention to the corpse of their fellow white man.”Footnote ⁸ The Jérémie incident suggested that the country’s national identity and future might be decided symbolically in two locations: the customs house – a place of international dealings where the Haitian state and Haitian merchants negotiated and exchanged with their international peers – and the playhouse – where Haitian elites created and projected idealized images of Haitian citizens for domestic and international consumption.

Domestic Haitian politics, observed as they were by the entire world, took on the quality of spectacle: the ostentatious expurgation of every Frenchman from the population performed what the world should understand to be the character of the new nation: resolutely, irrevocably not French, a dramatic spectacle to outdo the performance of officer Raynal, who had acted Haitian only to try in vain to renounce his role and run offstage. Yet, in turn, theater was itself a mirror and vector of domestic and international politics and its complexities, notably in its obligation to account for French influence which, in the playhouse as in the customs house, never fully disappeared. In the first two decades of independence, the Haitian cultural and political elite attempted to shape and project representations of independence for the new nation, within the country and to the outside world, both on the stage and on the staging docks.

Pierre Flignau’s L’Haïtien expatrié

During the Haitian Revolution, the War of the South that pitted southern gens de couleur (free people of color) leader André Rigaud against Toussaint Louverture between 1799 and 1800 left deep wounds in that region. Escaping the island after their defeat in the summer of 1800, Rigaudins scattered throughout the Caribbean, the United States, or France; some of them returned to the island with Leclerc’s expedition, only to eventually join Dessalines’s Indigenous Army. United against the French, pre-independence factions were now officially reconciled, but none of the former enemies had forgotten the past; many Southerners still “held in horror” the name of Dessalines for his actions in Louverture’s service during the War of the South.Footnote ⁹

Theater had been popular across colonial Saint-Domingue’s socio-racial castes. Despite drastic racist restrictions, on the eve of the revolution gens de couleur had managed to impose their presence in playhouses around the colony, in the audience but also on stage, where they contributed to developing a repertoire echoing with the linguistic and artistic specificities of the island.Footnote ¹⁰ Left to “drag itself like a wounded beast” in Cap after the playhouse burned down with most of the city in 1793, theater lived on in the southern cities of Jérémie and Les Cayes, where plays were performed on a regular basis throughout the revolution and up to independence.Footnote ¹¹ If performance was now open to all, and Saint-Domingue stages overwhelmingly populated by Black actors and musicians, writing plays seemingly remained the domain of the literate – and playwrights of early Haiti were overwhelmingly gens de couleur educated in France. In November 1804, after the declaration of independence and Dessalines’s coronation as Emperor Jacques I, Les Cayes saw a performance of the first Haitian-authored play known to have been produced in independent Haiti, Pierre Flignau’s L’Haïtien expatrié. It focused on a topic especially significant in André Rigaud’s former capital: national unity. The play opens as Alix – a free man of color “forced to abandon [his] homeland” because of the Leclerc expedition – disembarks on the Danish colony of Saint Thomas.Footnote ¹² There, he meets and befriends Lindor, an African-born man who escaped Saint-Domingue at the end of the War of the South. As they attempt to register with local administration officers, the latter say the two men are “too enlightened to live with our people” and vow to expel them; but before they face further hostility, Lindor and Alix find out that the Leclerc expedition has been defeated.Footnote ¹³ No longer fugitives from French colonial power, no longer colonial subjects, they can now become Haitians. “May Heaven let the telling of our story prove to every Haitian that he must expect safety only from his country!” Alix exclaims, before the two men decide to sail back to their homeland.Footnote ¹⁴

The War in the South hovers over the proceedings: in 1800, on escaping Saint-Domingue, Rigaud – undoubtedly Lindor’s unnamed former commander – also had passed through Saint Thomas. Alix and Lindor’s principal foe – Saint Thomas colonial officer Kénélis, a “mean man, though Black” working for profit without any consideration for other Black people – is dubbed “a Danish Laplume”: a version of the Saint-Domingue officer who, after fighting under Louverture during the War of the South, stayed on to serve the French until Rochambeau demoted all Black officers.Footnote ¹⁵ The play comments on the way old revolutionary-era feuds should be overcome in independent Haiti: former Rigaud supporters may resent Laplume for his brutal behavior during the War of the South, but it is for his betrayal of all Saint-Domingue parties in serving the pro-slavery Leclerc administration that he proves a villain. Alix and Lindor recognize in Kénélis’s anti-Black behavior the issue that federated Saint-Domingue parties against the French. Saint Thomas, the play suggests, is not unlike Saint-Domingue: its main issue is the racist colonial system, but Haiti has a solution. With the French gone, those now in power are our protagonists’ true brethren: Haitians all, Black by choice, and welcoming the return of their brethren. Exiled from a divided, war-torn colonial Saint-Domingue, Alix and Lindor choose to go home to a united, independent Haiti. The theme of war exiles returning to the island was in the air; it resonates with Dessalines’s January 14, 1804 decree, which offered to pay ship captains for transporting “a great number of Native Blacks, and Men of Colour … suffering in the United States of America, for want of the means of returning.”Footnote ¹⁶ According to Ardouin, this decision “set a principle in favor of the admission of the entire black race” into the Haitian homeland.Footnote ¹⁷ On the face of it, Flignau’s play accompanied the political transition from revolution to nation-building, notably by highlighting the principle of Black unity as an essential component of the new nation’s self-definition. Yet the play also shows that national myths do not necessarily trump internecine feuds.

Flignau mentions directly neither Rigaud nor Louverture: his play blames the War of the South on the French, Haiti’s “barbarous enemies”;Footnote ¹⁸ naming only Laplume – the traitor – among former enemies of the South, it bypasses the persistent enmity between the parties in that conflict. Flignau’s Rigaudins, portrayed as mere members of the Saint-Domingue diaspora in exile, are granted the nobler status of ambassadors for their country and are thus integrated into Haiti’s budding national narrative. A former Rigaudin himself, Nicolas Geffrard – to whom the play is dedicated – appeared the living proof that Haitians could overlook the bitterest of feuds to “support the Independence of Hayti,” given his alliance with Dessalines.Footnote ¹⁹ Too good to be true: as Erin Zavitz notes, the protagonists’ “national homecoming is tainted by regional sentiment,” as the absence of color prejudice, a defining value for the new state, is presented in the play rather as a Rigaudin characteristic.Footnote ²⁰ Flignau’s curated version of national unity was designed to satisfy Southerners that this new country was indeed also – if not mostly –theirs.

For Alain Badiou, if there is some truth to the commonplace that politics is theater, “it is rather the opposite that is the case … : of all the arts, theatre is the one that most insistently stands next to (or supposes) politics.”Footnote ²¹ The very fact of theatrical performance participates in the building of the state, particularly in the way it transforms revolution: “Theatre has always treated the revolution as a myth. Let me add in passing that this does not prove that it was a myth but only that, in theatre, that part of the revolution that was not a myth cannot be represented.”Footnote ²² Arguably, what Flignau could not represent at the time he wrote his play was that divisions among Haitians, forgotten for a time, had not disappeared, and anti-Dessalines sentiment remained strong in the South, including among his brothers in arms. The revolutionary “myth” he portrays in his play appears to exonerate all parties involved in the War of the South. Yet this is a southern play, about Southerners, performed for Southerners mere weeks after Emperor Jacques I’s coronation, and featuring no other Haitian political or regional faction.

Beyond the erasure of domestic feuds, a broader form of social and cultural erasure is revealed, dependent in part on print culture and its prejudices. For Hénock Trouillot, early Haitian authors wrote “combat literature” influenced by the political writings of revolutionary France and “the properly colonial writers and poets who were their elders.”Footnote ²³ Focused on print culture and written documents, this genealogy does not take into consideration the unwritten cultural influence of the countless men and women who had fought the French alongside the elite. The omission of the rich, varied, but essentially non-textual modes of cultural expression of the great majority of the Haitian population (orature, music, dance, spirituality) parallels the terms of the Haitian state’s formation as “a structure situated outside the local political community.” According to Jean Casimir, the state lacked “the kind of political body that is the prerequisite for any form of lived citizenship. In these circumstances, the only kind of citizenship that could bud was ceremonial.”Footnote ²⁴ Early Haitian theater, produced by the same elites in control of the Haitian state apparatus, helped conceive the terms of this ceremonial citizenship and circulate it. The commitment to popular sovereignty expressed in the government’s official communications and decrees, imbued with the egalitarian language of the French Revolution, “was limited to the verbal framing of legal texts,” a declaration of intent with little application in Haiti’s political life.Footnote ²⁵ Power and governance belonged to the army, and commanding officers formed the country’s new elites. To legal texts we can add theatrical texts; often written by the same authors in charge of drafting Haiti’s laws and proclamations, the plays of early independence were among the means of disseminating the visions of a state system in the making. These visions developed in a double contrast to the former French colonizer, but also to cultural forms linked to the formerly enslaved. Such a signifier of popular Haitian culture as Creole, when featured in early Haitian drama, tends to serve as an endearing but also comedic idiosyncrasy and source of local color, while Vodou tends to be presented as a liability, jeopardizing the performance of nationhood, which must be defeated on stage so it can be defeated throughout the country.

Political Theater

Thomas Madiou writes that when Flignau’s play was first staged, “concerts and melodrama composed by young Haitians about the principal episodes of [the] national war” were also being performed in Port-au-Prince. Enthusiastic, lively crowds came to watch, prominent officers such as Alexandre Pétion or Germain Frère sitting among them.Footnote ²⁶ Although most of these plays are presumed lost, we can surmise with Trouillot “that the hushed, secret wars between factions were equally reflected in this literature.”Footnote ²⁷ The harmony invoked in Flignau’s play never quite materialized: in Chelsea Stieber’s words, Dessalines’s short tenure at the head of the country was marked by “constant internal tension between Dessalineans in the North and southern republicans, with each group vying to define the post-independence future of Haiti.”Footnote ²⁸ In the lead-up to Dessalines’s assassination, Nicolas Geffrard formed plans for a revolt which were only thwarted by his death in May 1806.Footnote ²⁹ Nevertheless, it was in his city of Les Cayes that the first troops rose up in arms against the emperor, aided and abetted by a coalition mostly made up of former Rigaudin officers. Indeed, theater was politics: Rigaudin exiles similar to those featured in Flignau’s play – among them generals Guy-Joseph Bonnet and Pierre-Charles Lys, who had both returned only after independence – were prominent in the amateur troupe performing at the Port-au-Prince playhouse.Footnote ³⁰

Robert Cornevin speculates that the “news plays” then popular in Port-au-Prince constituted “a kind of commedia dell’arte where improvisation on the part of naturally talented and often little educated actors took the place of non-existent texts on themes familiar to the audience from the latest news.”Footnote ³¹ One can imagine the electrifying effect of having on the stage the very actors of the scenes they dramatized. Former exiles Lys and Bonnet’s presence on stage mirrored the conceit of Flignau’s play, just as the play projected their political legitimacy as spectacle. Works from the French repertoire were also performed: Lys and Bonnet thus played Cassius and Brutus, murderers of Caesar, in Voltaire’s La Mort de César. Elite republicans conspiring to kill a populist autocrat on stage, they and their allies reprised their roles in real life. The republican faction “cast Haiti as the lone remaining instantiation of the values of Enlightenment liberalism and republicanism that metropolitan France had failed to secure.”Footnote ³² In the process, they effected a peculiar feat of time-bending, “returning” the empire to a rightful republican regime it had never actually known, other than on stage. The deed, taking the playhouse into politics, would also have consequences in the customs house. Writing to Jamaica governor Eyre Coote to inform him of the republican plot, General Férou, commander at Jérémie, portrayed the action as “an effort to restore order and morals in the country”; trade, now “freed of all the chains that hindered it,” was guaranteed to thrive.Footnote ³³

Emperor Jacques I was killed in an ambush on October 17, 1806, his closest collaborators meeting their own demise soon after. Yet his secretary general, Juste Chanlatte, lived to see the next act. The Senate, controlled by Pétion’s faction, named General Henry Christophe head of the provisional government, only to ratify in December a new constitution that curtailed his power, leading Christophe to march on Port-au-Prince in the early days of 1807. Having failed to take the city, he returned to his headquarters in the North, where he declared himself head of the State of Haiti, while Pétion was named president of the Republic of Haiti in the South. Juste Chanlatte chose Christophe.

A well-to-do homme de couleur educated in France, Chanlatte made a name for himself in the early days of the revolution as a provocative and rousing voice, before leaving the island in the late 1790s for the USA, returning only after January 1804 and immediately joining Dessalines’s privy council.Footnote ³⁴ Chanlatte was arguably the most renowned and respected writer in the nation. As Christophe’s secretary, he set the tone for what Chelsea Stieber calls the “paper war” between the two Haitian states in his Réflexions sur le prétendu Sénat de Port-au-Prince (1807), a scathing attack presenting the Pétion-controlled Senate as a theater filled with mediocre actors. He notably singled out actual actors such as Bonnet – whose alleged bad deeds “inscribed his name, in letters of gold, on the frontispiece of the theater where he plays one of the principal roles” – or “Lys, the self-satisfied,” whose stage acting Chanlatte evokes to deride him as a “hero of the backstage.”Footnote ³⁵ According to Chanlatte, their poor acting skills mirror their poor governing skills: they are mere “diplomatic jugglers who boast about their ability to mesmerize their compatriots with vain sleight of hand,” lowly street performers whose craft is to mislead, in contrast to the actor’s noble task of make-believe.Footnote ³⁶

Chanlatte had much to say about the bad actors in the South: in 1809, in the Gazette officielle, he mocked the rhymes of Antoine Dupré, then a rising voice among the men of letters of the Republic, and ridiculed his acting pretensions: “what could one reasonably expect from a pitiful buffoon who, weary of butchering all tragic roles, carelessly exposed himself to Pegasus’s kicks? He is ridiculous to the utmost in all his plays.”Footnote ³⁷ Dupré’s comedies of manners were popular in Port-au-Prince; still he joined republican troops under General Lamarre in the defense of Môle-Saint-Nicolas against Christophe’s forces. Lamarre eventually died at his post, providing inspiration for Dupré’s most famous play La Mort du Général Lamarre (1810), whose reputation – though not the text itself –Footnote ³⁸ persists. The play, in which Dupré himself also acted, provided the republican state with an immediate myth in which actors and characters of history merged and the distinction between politics as theater and theater as politics blurred.Footnote ³⁹ Not long after, another southern myth miraculously reappeared: André Rigaud somehow escaped from a French jail and made a triumphant return, only to take advantage of his popularity to lead the South in a scission from the republic from his headquarters in Les Cayes. Cornevin tells us that “most members of the cultivated elite” from the South and the West rejoined his short-lived state; with Dupré, Bonnet, and Lys, Rigaud notably recruited the most recognizable actors of the republican political theater, demonstrating, if need be, that their dislike for Dessalines had less to do with anti-authoritarian values than with who held authority.Footnote ⁴⁰

They returned to Port-au-Prince when Rigaud died in 1811, and Dupré resumed writing and staging plays drawn from reality. His comedies focused on common people rather than military heroes: Odéide, ou la honte d’une mère (1813),Footnote ⁴¹ a play about plaçage – a form of concubinage inherited from the colonial era – was inspired by a famous court case. According to Ardouin, both the case and Dupré’s play contributed to changing public opinion on the practice, such that “mothers feared the public’s bloody reproach” and no longer dared deliver their daughters as concubines.Footnote ⁴² Ardouin presents the moment as a civilizational triumph, illustrating Jean Casimir’s argument that Haitian elites “took no interest in the lakou, plaçage … and all the institutions that managed interpersonal relations,” except to “decry and attack them, sensing danger in the way they seemed to tolerate or promote forms of local autonomy in opposition to the central executive power.”Footnote ⁴³ Theater could be more instrumental than even the government in promoting “marriage as a social virtue” and serve, as it were, as the continuation of politics by dramatic means, expressing the opinions of the elite in artistic form.

Chanlatte and the Theatrical Kingdom

Meaning to deride Henry Christophe – crowned King Henry I in 1811 – and possibly answer in kind Chanlatte’s theater-centric attacks on the republic, southern republican writer Jules Solime Milscent called him “the theatrical king of the northern part of our homeland,”Footnote ⁴⁴ but the king and his court had no qualms about using the art form’s enormous potential to project an ideal image of the regime both within the island and abroad.

Theater was a matter of domestic and international prestige. The kingdom boasted a Théâtre Royal, a troupe made up of courtiers “playing for their Majesties’ pleasure and for the perfection of Art.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Theater in the kingdom seemingly mirrored in drastic manner the gap between the ruling elites and the Haitian masses. According to W. W. Harvey, Henry’s aristocratic troupe “deemed it beneath their dignity to descend to the capacity of players, unless at the instance of their master.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The troupe seemingly only performed at the court, for the king, his courtiers, and notable foreign guests, except on rare occasions: during a tour throughout the eastern part of the kingdom in January 1814, the Théâtre Royal thus produced French plays once popular in colonial Saint-Domingue for assembled guests and the local population.Footnote ⁴⁷ Henry had a theater built outside Cap for the entertainment of the common people, but Harvey argues that the king’s subjects, though fond of Haitian productions, had no interest in seeing the king’s troupe perform plays drawn from the French repertoire.Footnote ⁴⁸

This sheds light on the background to Chanlatte’s three forays into theatrical writing: L’Entrée du roi en sa capitale (1818), the epic drama Néhri, Chef des Haytiens (1819), and La Partie de chasse du roi (1820). L’Entrée du roi is a one-act comic opera with a simple plot: as they prepare for King Henry’s visit, inhabitants of Cap from a variety of social categories converse and sing, praising life in the kingdom and Henry’s rule, until the king appears in the final act. In the opening scene, the lovers Valentin and Marguerite speak in Creole, following a Saint-Domingue-specific tradition dating to the pre-revolutionary era of troupes “tapping for sap into the customs and mores of the colony and staging, with audacity and success, the very savor of Saint-Domingue’s Creole.”Footnote ⁴⁹ While Creole emphasizes Haiti’s national and linguistic particularities to domestic and foreign audiences, it simultaneously evokes known prejudices related thereto. Thus, Valentin humbly says that some may believe him stupid “because his mouth isn’t sweet and his language isn’t golden.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet the scorn, however benign, comes here from other Haitians such as Valentin and Marguerite’s boss, who patronizingly pokes fun at Valentin’s song delivered in Creole-accentuated French, even as he recognizes its potential as popular, comedic entertainment. Nevertheless, Valentin and Marguerite are more versatile than they seem. Enjoining Marguerite to sing the French lyrics he wrote, Valentin says, “this way everybody will know that when Marguerite so desires, she can speak even better than Madam Syntax.”Footnote ⁵¹ French is, after all, the international language of diplomacy more than merely that of the former oppressor; as such, Haitians could use it to bolster the prestige of the kingdom, losing their accent from one song to the next to impress the elite foreign audience at Henry’s court. Among the spectators of the play were likely the foreign traders, officers, and dignitaries often admitted to Henry’s court, some of whom had been present at his 1811 coronation to see a performance of La Partie de chasse du roi Henry IV, a play by Charles Collé that would inspire Chanlatte.Footnote ⁵²

The effect is ambivalent: while “the population of the nineteenth century thought in the national language, spoke to each other in the national language, remembered the past and imagined the future in the national language,” their stage representatives only pay lip service to Creole, performing as they primarily did for elite and foreign audiences.Footnote ⁵³ This is especially clear in the scene involving an English officer: the festivities have made a deep impression on him, as he is about to return to Europe and report on what he has seen to his king. Having “seen all the monarchs in the world,” he explains in heavily accented French that Henry “is one of the greatest and most glorious.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet neither he nor his report to the king of England alone can decide whether “a perfect union and good intelligence will reign between [the] two nations”: ultimately, only the English people can, and they “love honesty and esteem courage, and the Haitian people possess both of these virtues.”Footnote ⁵⁵ There is some irony in the fact that much of Henry’s communications with the Court of St James’s, in the absence of official diplomatic channels, relied precisely on this type of individualized testimonies, letters or reports. Theater similarly acted as proto-diplomacy, projecting an image of the Haitian kingdom apt to sway its foreign allies.

Tabitha McIntosh recently located in European archives copies of the long thought lost play Néhri, Chef des Haytiens (1819).Footnote ⁵⁶ Subtitled “a tragedy in three acts,” the play is perhaps more accurately described as a heroic drama. As such, it stands out as a stark example of epic world-(re)making. Néhri begins as a fleet led by French general Alsomphe arrives to take control of Hayti in 1802. The “Haytians” led by Néhri refuse to surrender; they engage the French and eventually triumph. Néhri, the anagrammatic name of the title character, is quite transparently a phonetic rearrangement of the name Henry, and the character a version of Henry Christophe.Footnote ⁵⁷ The plot borrows liberally from events surrounding the arrival of the Leclerc expedition, yet the entire play is a kind of alternative history. In this semi-fictional world, Néhri rules – seemingly as a king (his officers call him Sire) – over a country already known as Hayti in 1802. In a self-reflective argument on commemoration, Néhri declares to the French ambassador:

No direct mention is made of either Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, or any other recognizable figure of the revolution, anagrammatically or otherwise; Haiti’s eventual independence is assigned entirely to the future king’s actions in the face of invasion – in a bold reversal, these actions are the expression of an already existing independence. In Néhri, Chanlatte turns Christophe into a neoclassical hero, but Néhri also extends to the stage the mode of polemic typical of the first generation of postcolonial thinkers hailing from Haiti. To French general Alsomphe’s claim that the French gave humanity the “sumptuous present” of fraternity and equality, Néhri responds: “Great God! Who more than us did love for their decrees profess? | Who more than us, alas, deserved of their progress?”Footnote ⁵⁹ Néhri argues that the behavior of the French was a betrayal of the purported values of their revolution, which justifies the Haytian struggle for independence, but also posits Haytians as the rightful holders of said values.

A similar argument is developed in Chanlatte’s last play, the comic opera La Partie de chasse du Roi, first performed on January 1, 1820, Haitian Independence Day, likely at the newly built theater in Cap. Like L’Entrée, a pageant presenting different categories of Haitians from servants to noblemen, this comedy, inspired by Collé’s La Partie de chasse du roi Henri IV, replaces the Bourbon king with Chanlatte’s Henry I and mixes Creole- and French-speaking scenes and characters.Footnote ⁶⁰ For managing to “conciliate two things that the malice and perversion of men had until now presented as incompatible: royalty and freedom,” Henry I is found to be the best of all kings, a message delivered in performance to the domestic audience, that was also meant to participate in the kingdom’s international campaign of cultural diplomacy, though the circulation of the printed play was curtailed by King Henry’s demise in October 1820.Footnote ⁶¹

Ideal Haitians

The work of Jules Solime Milscent shows similar concern for shaping an image of Haiti formative for its citizens and palatable for an international audience that clearly implied France, where the publications of the Republic of Haiti circulated. Born free in the North, Milscent lived in France between 1790 and 1816, when he settled in Port-au-Prince.Footnote ⁶² He and other returnees soon “became integral to Pétion’s effort to reassert, and perform, republicanism in Haiti and in the Atlantic world,” founding in 1817 Haiti’s first literary review, L’Abeille Haytienne.Footnote ⁶³ Milscent was the editor of the journal in which he notably published fables and songs. Milscent may also have authored the play Le Philosophe-Physicien, a play performed on stage in Port-au-Prince before being published in L’Abeille Haytienne.Footnote ⁶⁴ Gelanor, a scientist, has invented a concoction “capable of exciting the brain to the point of forcing people to reveal their most secret thoughts.”Footnote ⁶⁵ A series of couples (spouses, friends, employers, and employees) try Gelanor’s product in his “chamber of Truth,” only to realize that their relationships are based on lies and deceit. Two young lovers turn out to be the only ones whose claims match their inner feelings, and the play ends in song with the promise of their imminent marriage.

Like Dupré’s productions, Le Philosophe-Physicien is a news play of sorts: discussing superstition with Gelanor, the character François evokes a young Haitian woman witnessed by many performing such miraculous feats as extracting feathers, needles, and other objects from her eyes and ears – a reference to similar events that occurred in August 1820 and received much attention from Haitian journalists and writers. Noël Colombel (Milscent’s collaborator at L’Abeille) notably wrote a pamphlet meant to debunk the “miracle” and more generally “unroot the errors and prejudices birthed by ignorance and bad faith which constitute a true plague for humanity.”Footnote ⁶⁶ To him, the Vodou spirituality practiced by the rural, laboring majority featured prominently among these “errors,” and Haiti must forfeit them to demonstrate civilized behavior to the world, a concern Milscent also had expressed in his “Considerations on the Island of Haiti”:

Le Philosophe-Physicien shares this outlook, striving as it does to improve Haitian mores through humor; it also delivers an introspective writer’s reflection on how theatrical make-believe might serve to communicate the “truth” to the ignorant.Footnote ⁶⁸

In the conversation that opens the play, Gelanor has a discussion with his servant François, who believes in magic and thinks that papalois, Vodou practitioners, “are as clever as your physicians.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Gelanor mirrors Colombel’s rationalist demonstration, notably when he evokes the possibility of publishing a book on his experiment so as to “contribute to perfecting the human species.”Footnote ⁷⁰ His argument does not move François, who believes that a dose of entertainment is necessary to impart messages to the largest audience. In what may be a joke at Colombel’s expense, François responds to Gelanor’s plan to turn his findings into a book with similar doubt: “readings of this kind dispose people to sleep.”Footnote ⁷¹ He expects that Gelanor’s chamber of Truth will fail as a spectacle because “No one wants to pay to hear hard truths.”Footnote ⁷² How then does one present a hard truth in a palatable way?

The answer is theater. Despite all his rhetoric about the sincerity of science, Gelanor gets into the spirit of show business; he dons special clothes to “give an air of magic” to his experiments.Footnote ⁷³ First in line are two young lovers, brought in by the bride’s parents to test the young man’s sincerity; but Gelanor encourages them to see others go through the ordeal before they do. The loving couple therefore observes the entire proceedings. We watch them watch others take, and fail, the test of honest and true relationship. This double remove, which allows humor and self-reflection but also stages virtue as both innate and performed, is Gelanor’s truth serum. His very science is artifice, fiction designed to make spectators think about the meaning and role of “truth” – which in the play aligns traditional marriage with scientific rationalism – in their own daily social interactions. Le Philosophe-Physicien thus proclaims the superiority of play over demonstration, of the theater over the pamphlet as vehicle for civil betterment:

The coda of Le Philosophe-Physicien enjoins the audience entertained by the play to apply its precepts in their own lives, a clear hint that Le Philosophe-Physicien was part and parcel of a “civilizing” campaign. The image projected here, ignoring Creole and condemning Vodou spirituality, shows ideal Haitians as bearers of elite social norms and values disconnected from common Haitians’ lived experience. Finding Haitian reality wanting, the playwright offers a corrective on stage meant to model the change expected from the Haitian populace in real life.

On July 3, 1825, a French fleet arrived in Port-au-Prince harbor, carrying King Charles X of France’s Royal Ordinance conceding “to the current inhabitants of the French section of Saint-Domingue the full and total independence of their government,” on the condition of preferential customs duties for France and the payment of an enormous indemnity of 150 million francs to former French colonists.Footnote ⁷⁵ President Jean-Pierre Boyer accepted the offer, presenting it as a harbinger of better days. Thus, in the Proclamation announcing his decision to the Haitian people published on July 11, 1825, he painted a bright future for the nation: “Citizens! Commerce and agriculture will expand. The arts and the sciences, which thrive in peace time, will hasten to embellish your new destinies with all the benefits of civilization.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Boyer’s dream of prosperity through the customs house would prove elusive; the agreement opened the door to the normalization of diplomatic relations between Haiti and other nations – after France, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Denmark soon followed suit – but it also allowed France to “exert exclusive financial domination and shared commercial domination” over Haiti, as the debt immediately crippled the country.Footnote ⁷⁷ Opening the borders to France equally affected Haiti’s playhouses: for the next two decades, original Haitian drama all but disappeared from the local repertoire as “Parisian melodrama and vaudeville invaded [Haitian] stages.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In the 1840s, a new generation of playwrights would again find in Haiti’s revolution material to reassert a national voice;Footnote ⁷⁹ there would be no such deus ex machina for Haiti’s economy.