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Mémoire and Vindicationism
in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue
Chelsea Stieber
The door had hardly closed on the cell in the Fort de Joux prison when Toussaint Louverture
began composing his account of the past seven months. Deprived of his personal papers—
letters, official documents, and copies of other texts he had written—it was slow going.
Nevertheless, he believed his defense and vindication rested on producing his own account
of the events. In a matter of weeks, he had drafted his mémoire: a document that he attested
was “un compte exact de [sa] conduite” surrounding the arrival of General Charles Leclerc’s
squadron in the bay of Cap Français on 5 February 1802, Leclerc’s order to arrest him, and
his deportation.1 With his mémoire, Louverture followed the customary military bureaucratic
channels available to him to defend his conduct, plead his innocence, and offer evidence in
support of his claims. Indeed, Louverture was in many ways constrained to the genre of the
mémoire to achieve his ultimate goal: to petition his superior—Napoléon Bonaparte—to grant
him a military tribunal so that he might clear his name and see justice done for him and his
family. This was well within his rights as a high-ranking colonial military official. Bonaparte
refused him. Louverture was found dead in his prison cell on 7 April 1803.
1 “An exact account of [his] conduct”; Toussaint Louverture, “Mémoire du général Toussaint Louverture,” 1802, AF/IV/1213,
Archives Nationales (hereafter AN), Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, France. Many thanks to Julia Gaffield for helping me access this
document. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. Louverture had immediately asked for writing materials
upon his imprisonment at the Fort de Joux, according to letters sent by his jailer, Baille. See Philippe Girard, ed., The
Memoir of Toussaint Louverture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 39n33. A note on transcription: for the manuscript
mémoires cited here from Toussaint Louverture and Julien Raimond, I quote directly from the original documents as they
were written, reproducing exact spelling and grammar.
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SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 31
Recent scholarship in Haitian literature and history has shed crucial new light on Louver-
ture’s mémoire, its importance in his larger body of work, and the many uncertainties that
persist surrounding the document’s production and purpose.2 While recent work has situated
the genre of Louverture’s mémoire within the longer tradition of ancien régime aristocratic
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mémoires that preceded it and the nineteenth-century practice of mémoires-as-history that
it is seen as anticipating, this essay focuses on its immediate context: the mass of bureau-
cratic and administrative writing in revolutionary Saint-Domingue. There were, in fact, scores
of military and administrative bureaucratic mémoire-type documents produced in and about
colonial and revolutionary Saint-Domingue.
While mémoires were penned by men of different classes throughout the colonies and the
metropole, I argue that they took on a particular importance for a class of men whose legal
status and standing in the colony was tenuous and constantly shifting in the 1790s: gens de
couleur (free people of color).3 Free people of African descent found themselves in a vexed
discursive position: subject to increasingly restrictive legal codes in the latter half of the eigh-
teenth century, gens de couleur did not have the same access as White planters to authoritative
speech.4 Even after the colonial government granted gens de couleur limited political rights
(1791) and full equality (1792), their status—and discursive standing—were heavily contested by
White planters and the colonial lobby. A mémoire occupied precisely this in-between discursive
position: it did not rise to the status of an authoritative or declarative document but did furnish
its author with some standing from which to lobby, plead, provide evidence, and demand that
a right be upheld or that justice prevail. Julien Raimond, a wealthy planter, wrote a series of
2 See Daniel Desormeaux, “The First of the (Black) Memorialists: Toussaint Louverture,” trans. Deborah Jenson and Molly
Krueger Enz, Yale French Studies, no. 107 (2005): 131–45; Jacques de Cauna, ed., Mémoires du Général Toussaint-
Louverture commentés par Saint-Rémy (Guitalens-L’Albarède: La Girandole, 2009); Daniel Desormeaux, ed., Mémoires du
général Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011); John Patrick Walsh, “Toussaint Louverture at a Crossroads:
The ‘Mémoire’ of the ‘First Soldier of the Republic of Saint-Domingue,’ ” Journal of Haitian Studies 17, no. 1 (2011): 88–105;
John Patrick Walsh, Free and French in the Caribbean: Toussaint Louverture, Aimé Césaire, and Narratives of Loyal Opposi-
tion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Girard, The Memoir of Toussaint Louverture; Arthur F. Saint-Aubin, The
Memoirs of Toussaint and Isaac Louverture (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2015).
3 The term gens de couleur designated a class in colonial Saint-Domingue whose membership varied according to the legal
status of people of African descent in the colony. People of African descent who had never been enslaved, like Julien
Raimond and André Rigaud, and enslaved people of African descent who obtained their freedom, like Louverture, both
belonged to the class of gens de couleur. In theory (though not in practice, as we shall see in Rigaud’s writing), the term
also evolved to encompass a widening class of people as the laws in the colony changed. The Convention’s 4 February
1794 proclamation declaring all enslaved people in the colonies to be “free citizens” in theory put all formerly enslaved
people into the category of gens de couleur. In lieu of the terms mulâtre/mulâtresse, sang-mêlé, and nègre/négresse,
which were in use at the time to designate the racial status of non-White people in the colony, I will use the term gens de
couleur or its English translation, free people (men, women, colonists, generals, planters, etc.) of African descent, and the
adjective Afro-descended. I will keep in quotations references to “freeborn” and “freed” gens de couleur, in reference to the
legal distinctions within the gens de couleur class prior to the 4 April 1792 proclamation (which granted equal rights to all
gens de couleur regardless of their legal status at birth). I also note that this terminology is distinct from the terms anciens
libres and nouveaux libres, which came into use after the 4 February 1794 law in order to distinguish between those who
had been free prior to general emancipation and those who became free as a result of it. On the imprecise language that
emerged to designate color and legal status in the mid-1790s, see Grégory Pierrot, The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019), chap. 3. On the racialized narrative of the Haitian Revolution that resulted from
these colonial racial terms, see Marlene Daut, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the
Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015).
4 Rae Langton, following J. L. Austin, refers to “authoritative illocutions,” or speech acts “whose felicity conditions require
that the speaker occupy a position of authority in a relevant domain.” Langton, “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts,”
Philosophy and Public Affairs 22, no. 4 (1993): 305 (italics in original).
32 [ Chelsea Stieber ] Mémoire and Vindicationism in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue
lobbyist mémoires in the mid-1780s, appealing to the French colonial government to reform
its increasingly prejudicial treatment of his class, the gens de couleur. André Rigaud, a free
man of color who served as a high-ranking official in the army, penned a mémoire to justify his
actions during an uprising in the southern part of the island and defend himself against racial-

ized accusations made by the French government’s Third Civil Commission. In a political and
social atmosphere in which their detractors continuously challenged their rights and standing,
gens de couleur sought recourse through a genre that privileged a forensic rhetoric of evidence,
citation, justification, and proof. What differentiates the revolutionary-era mémoire from so many
other forms of writing from the period and what I argue makes it specifically important for this
class is its reliance on documentation, footnotes, and reproduction of evidence to constantly
parry attacks on the legitimacy and standing of gens de couleur.
This essay contributes to the growing body of scholarship on Black writing that has
moved beyond the paradigm of the slave narrative toward other forms and genres of Black
protest.5 Building on recent scholarly work on Louverture’s mémoire and on Marlene Daut’s
analysis of the vindicationist humanism of Baron de Vastey, I connect gens de couleur’s use
of forensic rhetoric, evidence, protest, and refutation in their mémoires to the Black vindica-
tionist tradition.6 By further elucidating the conventions of the mémoire genre in revolutionary
Saint-Domingue—its emphasis on citation and evidence to persuade and refute—this essay
also offers insight into the origins of Haitian writing.7 Finally, this essay contributes to debates
on the nature of Louverture’s mémoire. When placed in the immediate context of revolution-
ary Saint-Domingue and similar writing from gens de couleur from the period, Louverture’s
mémoire looks less like the words of a man seeking to transmit his life’s work into a document
for posthumous glory (monumenta) and more like the demands of a man seeking justice and
5 On French-language writing, see Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2011). See also Chris Bongie, Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/colonial Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2008). On new approaches to African American print culture beyond the slave narrative, see Derek
Spires, The Practice of Citizenship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). See also Lara Langer Cohen and
Jordan Alexander Stein, eds., Early African American Print Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012);
Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Phillip Lapsansky, eds., Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American
Protest Literature, 1790–1860 (New York: Routledge, 2001); Frances Smith Foster, “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins
and (Somewhat) Surprising Development of African American Print Culture,” American Literary History (2005): 717–40; and
Joseph Rezek, “The Orations on the Abolition of the Slave Trade and the Uses of Print in the Early Black Atlantic,” Early
American Literature 45, no. 3 (2010): 655–82.
6 Marlene Daut, Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and
“Un-silencing the Past: Boisrond-Tonnerre, Vastey, and the Re-writing of the Haitian Revolution,” South Atlantic Review
70, no. 1 (2009): 35–64. On Black vindicationism, see St. Clair Drake, “Anthropology and the Black Experience,” Black
Scholar 11, no. 7 (1980): 2–31; Robert A. Hill, “C. L. R. James: The Myth of Western Civilization,” in George Lamming, ed.,
Enterprise of the Indies (Port of Spain: Trinidad and Tobago Institute of the West Indies, 1999); Anthony Bogues, Black
Heretics, Black Prophets (New York: Routledge, 2003); and David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial
Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
7 On the origins of Haitian writing, see Hénock Trouillot, Les origines sociales de la littérature haïtienne (Port-au-Prince: N. A.
Théodore, 1962); Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative; Chris Bongie, introduction to Baron de Vastey, The Colonial System
Unveiled (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014); Daut, Baron de Vastey; Chelsea Stieber, Haiti’s Paper War: Post-
independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954 (New York: New York University Press, 2020);
and Chris Bongie, “The Shadow of Voltaire: Early Haitian Literature and the Claims of Intertextuality,” in Kir Kuiken and
Deborah Elise White, eds., Haiti’s Literary Legacies: Romanticism and the Unthinkable Revolution (New York: Bloomsbury,
2021), 25–48. I follow Daut’s periodization of early Haitian writing that begins with Raimond’s pamphlets and extends
through Rigaud’s and Louverture’s mémoires; see Daut, Baron de Vastey.
SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 33
vindication by submitting a report to the record and making an official claim for his rights to
be recognized. In so doing, it clarifies Bonaparte’s treatment of Louverture and his mémoire,
refusing to grant it the official bureaucratic treatment it warranted. It is Bonaparte who unjustly
denied Louverture his papers, and his right to defend himself; it is Bonaparte whose crime

“remains unprosecuted and unpunished.”8
Mémoire and Vindicationism

The mémoire is ubiquitous almost to the point of insignificance in French bureaucratic writing.9
Indeed, archives from colonial Saint-Domingue are brimming with various mémoires: from
members of the colonial military corps who traveled and worked in the Antilles; from colonial
inhabitants who lobbied for their own interests; from representatives in the colony asked to
submit reports to the French government on the causes of unrest and insurrection; and from
military officers seeking to justify their conduct, defend against accusations, or make requests
of the military bureaucracy.
And yet, as I contend here, it is this genre of writing—its formal, rhetorical conventions and
its status within the French colonial state—that was especially important for gens de couleur.
But what is this genre, so commonly mistranslated as autobiography or “ego-document”?10 The
masculine singular, un mémoire, as it was used in the eighteenth-century bureaucratic sense,
can be translated into English as a number of kinds of documents: “memorial,” “memoran-
dum,” “record,” “report,” “bill,” “petition,” “request,” “proposal,” “paper,” “exposition,” “note,”
“statement,” and “account,” among others.11 The masculine plural, mémoires, in this specific
8 Gaetan Mentor, review of Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture, by Sudhir Hazareesingh, H-Haiti, H-Net
Reviews, April 2021, www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56440.
9 On eighteenth-century bureaucratic writing, see Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing (Brooklyn: Zone, 2012). The produc-
tion of mémoires stretches back to at least the sixteenth century, in which officials recorded accounts of battles, travel,
exploration, and service to the French crown. On the ancien régime practice of aristocratic mémoires, see Marc Fumaroli,
La diplomatie de l’esprit: De Montaigne à La Fontaine (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), cited in Desormeaux, Mémoires; and Walsh,
Free and French in the Caribbean. There are also specific variants of the mémoire written in different contexts, such as
the mémoire judiciaire, which was a legal brief (or a factum). See Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes
Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and David A. Bell, Lawyers and Citi-
zens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). The term mémoires
militaires designates the reports, petitions, and proposals written in the specific military context (mémoires de guerre,
mémoires de service, mémoires justificatifs). See Christy L. Pichichero, The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the
French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017). See also Laurie Wood, Archipelago
of Justice Law in France’s Early Modern Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020). The military bureaucratic use
of mémoire should be taken as distinct from the practice of autobiographical memoirs written at the end of one’s career.
George Egerton has also theorized the polygenre of political memoir, though his broad analysis does not touch on the
kind of bureaucratic mémoires under consideration here. See Egerton, “Politics and Autobiography: Political Memoir as
Polygenre,” Biography 15, no. 3 (1992): 221–42.
10 “Ego-documents” are a form of first-person life-writing that centers on the identity and esteem of the writer. See Volker
Depkat, “2.8 Ego-Documents,” in Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, ed., Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction (Boston: De
Gruyter, 2019), 262–67. On bureaucratic testimony and life-writing in the mid-nineteenth-century context of the posteman-
cipation British Caribbean, see Christienna Fryar, “The Narrative of Ann Pratt: Life-Writing, Genre, and Bureaucracy in a
Postemancipation Scandal,” History Workshop Journal, no. 85 (Spring 2018): 265–79.
11 See cnrtl.fr/definition/mémoire and www.dictionnaire-academie.fr/article/A9M1657. The confusion surrounding the term
is not just an issue for English speakers; it is widespread enough among French speakers that the Académie Française,
in the “Dire, ne pas dire” section of its website, published an entry specifically to clear it up. Dictionnaire de l’Académie
Française, “La mémoire, le mémoire,” www.dictionnaire-academie.fr/article/DNP0339.
administrative register can denote collections or multiples of the aforementioned documents,

as well as proposals, expositions, records, and so on that were collated to serve as an archive
or compendium, such as the assemblage of learned reports, papers, or proceedings. The
plural mémoires also denotes the assemblage of these reports specifically for the purposes

of future history writing, such as the common subtitle “mémoires pour servir à l’histoire.” In a
broad eighteenth-century bureaucratic sense, a mémoire was a report, an entry of evidence
and narrative account into the record, or a pleading, made in either a civil, administrative, or
military bureaucratic capacity.
To be sure, when considered diachronically the etymological connection between the vari-
ous historical uses of the term mémoire is clear. My contention here is that the bureaucratic
and especially judicial-forensic rhetoric of the revolutionary-era mémoire genre has tended
to get overshadowed by the nineteenth-century Romantic evolution of the genre toward an
almost universal plural mémoires/memoirs-as-autobiography. More specifically, the eighteenth-
century French juridical practice of mémoire writing—the mémoire judiciaire (or factum), one
of the most popular and widely read forms of printed matter in the decades leading up to the
French Revolution—is central to understanding the mémoires written by gens de couleur in
colonial Saint-Domingue and the forensic rhetoric of defense, justice, and vindication that
characterized them.12 I insist on this distinction because it is central to how scholars approach
the mémoires under study here, the conditions of their production, and their ultimate purpose.
How do our expectations of a given text differ depending on the meaning we assign to the
word mémoire(s)? What does the eighteenth-century bureaucratic genre tell us about what
the writer intended the document to do? The specificity of the genre that gens de couleur
chose—or indeed, were constrained to according to the norms and expectations of their rank
and position within the colony—tells us much about the period and about the production and
purpose of the documents they wrote.
This is especially true for Louverture’s mémoire, which has been the subject of much
scholarly debate. Recent scholarship in Haitian literature and history, most notably from
Daniel Desormeaux and John Walsh, has shed crucial new light on Louverture’s mémoire, its
importance in his larger body of work, and the many uncertainties that persist surrounding
the document. These uncertainties include whether to refer to the text in the singular or plural,
whether the multiple different copies of the document in French archives originate from the
same text, as well as more speculative questions surrounding Louverture’s ultimate goal in
writing the mémoire: Was he resigned to his fate? Was he writing for personal posterity? To
12 On eighteenth-century mémoires judiciaires and mémoires justificatifs, see Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs; Bell,
Lawyers and Citizens; and Sarah Maza, “Le tribunal de la nation: Les mémoires judiciaires et l’opinion publique à la fin de
l’Ancien Régime,” Annales 42, no. 1 (1987): 73–90. See also Dena Goodman, “The Hume-Rousseau Affair: From Private
Querelle to Public Procès,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 25, no. 2 (1991–92): 171–201; and Hervé Leuwers, “The Factums
of Robespierre the Lawyer: Choices of Defense by Printed Legal Brief,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 371,
no. 1 (2013): 55–71.
SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 35
construct a monument to himself? To save his reputation? Or was his purpose something
greater, some larger sense of justice?13
First and foremost, Louverture titled his text in the singular: “Mémoire du général Tous-
saint Louverture,” with the possessive (“du”) denoting that it recorded his own words written

by his own hand. He produced his own mémoire, and then, in collaboration with Jeannin, the
secretary provided to him by the French state, he read, revised, and amended drafts.14 And
while the official draft that Jeannin recopied and ultimately transmitted to Bonaparte bore
the title “Mémoire pour le Général Toussaint Louverture,” a customary practice in mémoires
judiciaires and mémoires justificatifs in the eighteenth century, the final official version also
bore the singular mémoire.15
For Jacques de Cauna, the expectations of the reader shift significantly when they read
about Louverture’s “mémoires” versus his “mémoire.” The plural mémoires, he argues, “oriente
immédiatement vers une toute autre interprétation: celle d’une chronique ou d’annales ou, au
minimum, de la relation écrite que fait une personne des événements auxquels elle a participé
ou dont elle a été témoin, voire de sa vie . . . alors que le singulier ouvrait uniquement sur le
sens premier d’exposé ou de requête écrite pour soutenir la prétention d’un plaideur.”16 De
Cauna insists that readers must follow Louverture’s own words that describe the text, which
place it squarely within the eighteenth-century bureaucratic judicial rhetorical genre of mémoire.
Louverture himself titled the document with the singular mémoire but also subsequently
referred to it in his letters as a rapport (report) and a réclamation (a complaint, specifically for
a right to be recognized).17
13 See Desormeaux, “The First of the (Black) Memorialists”; Desormeaux, Mémoires; de Cauna, Mémoires; Walsh, “Tous-
saint Louverture at a Crossroads”; and Walsh, Free and French in the Caribbean. See Girard, The Memoir of Toussaint
Louverture, for an overview of the various versions of the document held in French archives. There are three versions of
the manuscript held at the National Archives in Pierrefitte (one written in Louverture’s hand, the other two by a secretary).
There is also a version of the document in the Archives Nationales d’Outremer, likely the final version sent to Bonaparte.
The confusion about the singular or plural in the title stems largely from Joseph Saint-Rémy’s 1853 edition of Louverture’s
text bearing the plural title Mémoires du general Toussaint-Louverture, which he published in Paris while exiled from
Faustin Soulouque’s empire in Haiti. Joseph Saint-Rémy, Mémoires du général Toussaint-Louverture, écrits par lui-même,
pouvant servir à l’histoire de sa vie: Précédés d’une étude historique et critique avec un appendice contenant les opinions
de l’empereur Napoléon Ier sur les événements de Saint-Domingue (Paris: Pagnerre, 1853). Saint-Rémy’s edition included
a critical introduction from Saint-Rémy, the “Mémoires de Toussaint Louverture” (in the plural), and several additional
historical documents in annex. On Saint-Rémy’s (mis)use of the plural in his title, see de Cauna, Mémoires. Recent scholars
of Louverture’s mémoire have offered differing interpretations of Saint-Rémy’s decision to use the plural instead of the sin-
gular of Louverture’s original text, though it seems likely that he was casting the text within the nineteenth-century trend of
autobiographical memoirs, and in the French Republican reaction to Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s election as president of
the Second Republic and elevation to emperor in 1852. On Haitian Republican writers in exile in Paris during Soulouque’s
empire, see Stieber, Haiti’s Paper War.
14 On the collaboration with Jeannin and the additions and corrections that Louverture made by hand to versions of the
mémoire in the archives, see Walsh, Free and French in the Caribbean; and Girard, The Memoir of Toussaint Louverture.
15 On eighteenth-century mémoires justificatifs and mémoires judiciaires written “pour” clients and defendants, see Maza, “Le
tribunal de la nation.”
16 “Immediately directs us toward a completely different interpretation: that of a chronicle or of historical records or, at a
minimum, of the written account of events made by a person who participated in or witnessed them, even of their life . . .
whereas the singular opens only to the primary meaning of statement or written petition to support a litigant’s claims”;
de Cauna, Mémoires, 17. Girard adopts a similar classification of Louverture’s mémoire; see The Memoir of Toussaint
Louverture.
17 See de Cauna, Mémoires, 21–22. John Walsh notes that Victor Schoelcher classified Louverture’s text as a mémoire
justificatif in the nineteenth century, situating it within the bureaucratic judicial rhetoric of defense and justification; see
“Toussaint Louverture at a Crossroads,” 103n40.
Other readings of Louverture’s text have explored it as an example of life-writing, history,

and personal monument. Desormeaux’s labeling of Louverture as a “memorialist” and his
maintenance of the plural mémoires place Louverture more within a tradition of a chroniqueur
(chronicler) or historian, within the tradition of ancien régime mémoires and the evolution of

nineteenth-century autobiographical memoirs.18 Desormeaux’s reading of the mémoire within
this genre emphasizes Louverture’s resignation to his fate in the present, and his writing for
future posterity, an effort Desormeaux likens to “the spiritual quest of the warrior who believes
that he is leaving his memoirs (monumenta) behind him as others proudly leave their tombs,
which is to say as written tombs that will serve history, unveil glorious pasts, great military
memories.”19 For his part, John Walsh comes down somewhere between de Cauna’s and
Desormeaux’s readings of Louverture’s mémoire: “Louverture walked a fine line between
seeking justice for a public cause and memorializing his image for posterity. . . . Factum, one
might say, meets monumentum.”20 Walsh maintains that neither definition fully encompasses
what Louverture is doing with his text.
By returning to the codes of eighteenth-century writing and relevant examples from
revolutionary Saint-Domingue, I aim to add additional clarity to these scholarly debates on
Louverture’s mémoire. Of course, we cannot ultimately know what Louverture believed when
writing his mémoire. Yet even if we concede that his state of mind was one of resignation to
his fate, the form and codes of the genre he wrote in (based in elements of protest, forensic
rhetoric, presentation of evidence, and above all, present justice-seeking efforts) are significant
and warrant further reflection. To be sure, by insisting on the bureaucratic context for Louver-
ture’s mémoire I do not intend to take away from the text’s importance for our understanding
of Louverture, his life, and the powerful possessive “du” that makes his mémoire an example
of a document written by a formerly enslaved man who became the governor-general of Saint-
Domingue. Rather, by emphasizing the genre of the mémoire and especially its immediate
context in revolutionary Saint-Domingue, I believe we gain a deeper understanding of the
codes and expectations that shaped Louverture’s text. The bureaucratic and juridical codes
of Louverture’s mémoire become clearer when we consider it within the longer tradition of
mémoire-writing from revolutionary Saint-Domingue.
The gens de couleur in Saint-Domingue who produced the mémoires under study here
constitute a heterogenous group that nevertheless reached something close to parity under
the first French Republic. While Louverture was born to enslaved parents, André Rigaud was
born to a White French planter and an enslaved woman, and Julien Raimond was born to a
18 Desormeaux, “The First of the (Black) Memorialists.”

19 Ibid., 144.
20 Walsh, Free and French in the Caribbean, 88. Like Desormeaux, Walsh draws on Antoine Furetière’s definition of the Latin
monumenta as “a memorial erected to preserve the memory of some person” as linked to the preservation of the memory
and reputation of Louverture (quoted in ibid., 85).
SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 37
French planter and a free woman of color, each man eventually rose to the status of slave-
owner, plantation owner, and high-ranking government official. And while each received vary-
ing degrees of education, they all became well-versed in the bureaucratic genres available to
them as members of the colonial administration or high-ranking officers in the army. Raimond

wrote and signed most of his work and did not appear to have a secretary as a private citizen,
though he did receive the assistance of a secretary, his son-in-law Pascal, when he served on
the Third Civil Commission.21 Rigaud signed many of his texts without indicating a secretary,
as was the custom at the time, though historians suggest he worked with at least two: Louis
François Roger Armand Gatereau (or his anagram pen name, Mandar Argeaut) and a certain
Poutu.22 Louverture worked most often through secretaries, though he did occasionally write
letters in his own hand, as Deborah Jenson’s extensive research into his correspondence has
shown.23 He was active in drafting, editing, and revising various texts he produced in concert
with his personal secretaries.24
Crucially, each mémoire corresponded to a period in the writers’ career in which they
occupied spaces of subordinate or contested government power: as a wealthy private citizen
with much clout but no official government position (Raimond); as a general in an official govern-
ment position whose power was contested or suspended (Rigaud); and as a deposed former
government official (Louverture). The bureaucratic status of the mémoires reflects the writers’
status of subordinate or suspended power. They are, in the language of speech act theory, not
imbued with the illocutionary force that accompanies a speech act made from a position of
authority.25 As opposed to, say, an official rapport (report), a mémoire in this context never rises
to the status of authoritative or declarative government documentation. Mémoires do not carry
within them this implicit authority; rather, they carry with them a conditional, nonauthoritative
status. Mémoires exist at this boundary between official authorization to establish the facts,
21 John D. Garrigus, “Opportunist or Patriot? Julien Raimond (1744–1801) and the Haitian Revolution,” Slavery and Abolition
28, no. 1 (2007): 11.
22 Gatereau was a relatively well-known journalist and polemist who ran a number of newspapers in the 1790s and spent
the majority of the revolutionary period in exile in Philadelphia. On Gatereau, see Jean-Charles Benzaken, “Un journaliste
méconnu: Gatereau et la Révolution, de Montauban au Cap Français, Saint-Domingue,” Cultures et modes de sociabilité
méridionaux (online edition) (2007): 20–33; Adolphe Cabon, “Un siècle et demi de journalisme en Haïti,” Proceedings of the
American Antiquarian Society 49 (1939): 121–205; and Manuel Covo, “Le massacre de fructidor an IV à Saint-Domingue:
Violence et politique de la race sous le directoire,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 395, no. 1 (2019):
143–69. Guy-Joseph Bonnet references an “ancien secrétaire de Rigaud, réfugié aux Etats-Unis” (“former secretary of
Rigaud’s who has taken asylum in the United States”) with whom he corresponded in 1806 on a public instruction project
for Alexandre Pétion, which also likely refers to Gatereau. Reproduced in Dantès Bellegarde, Ecrivains haïtiens: Notices
biographiques et pages choisies (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1950), 13. Less is known about Poutu; Beaubrun
Ardouin refers to him as a “secrétaire de Rigaud” in 1806. Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti: Suivies de la vie
du Général J.-M. Borgella, 11 vols. (Paris: Dézobry et Magdeleine, 1856), 6:286.
23 Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative. See also Pierrot, The Black Avenger.
24 Sudhir Hazareesingh identifies Allier and Guybre as Louverture’s personal secretaries. Hazareesingh, Black Spartacus: The
Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), 280. Louverture himself mentions a certain
“[N]atant” (Nathan) as his secretary in his mémoire. Desormeaux, Mémoires, 183. On the likely apocryphal claim made by
Jules Michelet’s wife, Athenaïs Mialaret, that her father served as Louverture’s secretary, see Jenson, Beyond the Slave
Narrative, 66.
25 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1962).
an official narrative of events, even the truth; and the presentation of a set of facts, a narrative
of events, or even a truth that is submitted for consideration, weighing, inclusion, or exclusion
by an outside arbiter. In this way, the genre of mémoire also captures the shifting terrain of
color politics in revolutionary Saint-Domingue, as well as the ambiguity—and precarity—of the

legal status of free men of color in the period. To put a more specific definition on mémoires
from free people of color in revolutionary Saint-Domingue, then, they are not authoritative or
declarative documents intended to be taken prima facie but a presentation of arguments and
evidence designed to persuade and refute.
It is in the privileging of elements of protest, forensic rhetoric (reproductions of quotations,
excerpts from letters, annexed exhibit documents, and scores of footnotes), and justice-seeking
efforts that I see the hallmarks of the Black vindicationist tradition. Vindicationism has its
origins in Roman law (the nominative vindico and the plural vindiciae) and, by the early modern
period, came to mean the act of avenging a wrong, the suing for possession or claiming for
freedom, the act of championing a cause, or the act of punishing.26 It was foundational to an
early modern practice of argumentation that established justification for actions and defense
against censure by offering written proof. As print and pamphleteering boomed in the eighteenth
century, writers drew upon the early modern judicial frame in their rhetoric: they developed
arguments supported by evidence to prove that a topic, concept, theory, or position was
reasonable and justified.27 This is in accordance with Samuel Johnson’s eighteenth-century
definition of vindication as “defense, assertion, justification.”28
By emphasizing Roman law and the early modern practice of vindicationism here, I aim to
give a longer legal and rhetorical context to what scholars have termed the Black vindication-
ist tradition. Anthropologist St. Clair Drake coined an early definition of Black vindicationism
as a “special genre of intellectual activity” of eighteenth-century Black writing that “sought to
disprove slander, answer pejorative allegations, and criticize pseudoscientific generalizations
about Africans and people of African descent.”29 Likewise, Robert A. Hill defines a Black intel-
lectual tradition constructed in response to the “unremittingly hostile propaganda of European
and American racists for more than a century.”30 More recently, Anthony Bogues has identi-
fied what he calls “literary black vindicationism,” which emphasizes modes of criticism and
critique from the eighteenth century.31 Finally, Marlene Daut has argued for considering the
26 In Roman Law, vindicatio was the civil action against the temporary possessor by which a dominus exercised his
ownership and took back the possessio. See Daniel Lee, “Private Law Models for Public Law Concepts: The Roman
Law Theory of Dominium in the Monarchomach Doctrine of Popular Sovereignty,” Review of Politics 70, no. 3
(2008): 370–99. On the early modern meaning of vindication, see Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. vindication (n.),
www.etymonline.com/search?q=vindication.
27 One of the more notable of these pamphlets is Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures
on Political and Moral Subjects (London: Joseph Johnson, 1792).
28 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (Dublin: W. G. Jones, 1768).
29 Drake, “Anthropology and the Black Experience,” 10.
30 Hill, “C. L. R. James,” 257.
31 Bogues, Black Heretics. See also Dena Goodman, Criticism in Action: Enlightenment Experiments in Political Writing
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 39
early nineteenth-century vindicationist writings of Baron de Vastey at the origins of what she
has termed “Black Atlantic Humanism.”32
While Bogues does not take up writing from revolutionary Saint-Domingue, his opening
up of the rhetorical and political possibilities of eighteenth-century critical writing—beyond

and outside of the autobiographical, romantic slave narrative—is central to my reading of
colonial and revolutionary-era mémoires in Saint-Domingue.33 What is more, by emphasiz-
ing the eighteenth-century dimension of Black vindicationism and writing from revolutionary
Saint-Domingue within it, I am highlighting a different stream of vindicationism from David
Scott’s analysis of C. L. R. James’s Black vindicationist narrative.34 Scott builds his conception
of James’s Black vindicationism as emplotted through the mythos of romance and romantic
overcoming based on writing about the Haitian Revolution rather than the writing of the Haitian
Revolution itself. The Black vindicationist tradition that Scott describes through James is one
in which Haiti—the idea, the memory, the symbol—plays a role but in which Haitian writers
do not get a say in the script.
Writing on Haiti versus writing of Haiti, romantic narratives versus critical rhetorical argu-
ment: these are crucial distinctions for the genealogy of Black vindicationism. My point here
is to advocate, following Bogues’s framework and Daut’s foundational work on Vastey, for
the consideration of writing from revolutionary Saint-Domingue as part of the vindicationist
tradition based in rhetorical strategies and existing tropes including the forensic rhetoric of
defense, justice, and vindication. Put otherwise, if we uncouple vindicationism from its associa-
tion with romantic overcoming and return it to both its eighteenth-century use and its longer
legal and political framework from the early modern period, we gain an understanding of the
vindicationism at work in writing from revolutionary Saint-Domingue. Haitian vindicationism
was not purely or even primarily romantic; it was polemical, political, and bureaucratic.35 The
centrality of forensic rhetoric, refutation, and vindication to the revolutionary-era mémoires
attests to the combat stance that was well established even in this early writing of free people
of color in the colony. Their writing was not just a rhetorical combat; in the case of Louverture,
his mémoire was a fight for his own life.
32 Daut, Baron de Vastey.

33 Bogues bases this analysis on Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787), which
he deems “an explicit political essay” that refuted slavery not on the basis of first-person experience or an authentic life
narrative but “at the level of logic, reason, and religion” (33). His analysis of Cugoano may get us closer to revolutionary
Saint-Domingue than it might first appear. As Grégory Pierrot notes, Cugoano’s text was translated almost immediately
into French in 1788 by the Société des Amis des Noirs (with whom Raimond associated in 1789); see Pierrot, The Black
Avenger, 225n132. See also Grégory Pierrot, “Insights on ‘Lord Hoth’ and Ottobah Cugoano,” Notes and Queries 59, no. 3
(2012): 367–69.
34 Scott, Conscripts of Modernity.
35 This is not to say that revolutionaries did not engage with narratives of romantic overcoming. Rather, as Pierrot argues in
The Black Avenger, their engagement with these romantic narratives must be understood as strategic performances for
political ends.
Julien Raimond’s Lobbyist Mémoires

A wealthy planter in Saint-Domingue born to a French émigré who married into a successful
“freeborn,” Afro-descended planting family in the southern peninsula, Julien Raimond was
educated in France and then returned to the southern peninsula to establish himself as a

planter in the 1770s.36 Raimond’s coming of age during the 1760s and 1770s undoubtedly
shaped his colonial politics. Even as he established himself squarely within the planter elite,
as many “freeborn” men of color had in the midcentury, he found himself facing increasing
discrimination from the colonial government, prejudice from White colonists, and an ever-
narrowing definition of citizenship, Whiteness, and rights. He entered the political scene in
the 1780s as an activist campaigning for reforms to address colonial racism, which took the
form of lobbyist mémoires.
Writing in the general mode of eighteenth-century mémoires submitted to various ministries
by supplicants lobbying for reforms, Raimond produced a series of four mémoires to prove—
through evidence—the injustice of color prejudice against “cette classe . . . désignée dans la
Colonie française, sous le nom générique de Gens de Couleur.”37 This “empire du préjugé,” as
Raimond termed it, referred to a regime of ordonnances that the colonial administration had
promulgated in the colony since 1768.38 For gens de couleur, this included obligatory labor
service, the use of “qualifications toujours humiliantes” on their birth certificates, obligatory
military service, and prohibitions against such activities as dining with White people, wearing
certain types of fabrics and ornamentation, using European names, and exercising certain
professions.39 Raimond pleaded for the French government’s protection against this “vain,”
“inique,” and “barbare” prejudice, and asked for God to send them a great man to be their
36 On Raimond, see Florence Gauthier, L’aristocratie de l’épiderme: Le combat de la Société des Citoyens de Couleur,
1789–1791 (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2007); John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Garrigus, “Opportunist or Patriot?”
37 “This class . . . referred to in the French colony under the generic name of People of Color”; Julien Raimond, “1r Mémoire,”
1, “Mémoires à Monseigneur le maréchal de Castries,” n.d., four ms., C/F/3/91, Archives Nationales d’Outremer, Aix-en-
Provence, France. Many thanks to John Garrigus for providing information on his copies of these documents as I was
preparing my research. Raimond maintains that he made his “reclamations” to the colonial administrators as early as
1782. Although it is not clear what form this protest took, he is likely referring to the manuscript mémoires he wrote to the
minister of the Navy, maréchal de Castries, Charles Eugène Gabriel de La Croix. See Raimond, “Compte que Julien Rai-
mond rend au Comité de sûreté Générale, de toutes ses actions et écrits depuis l’année 1794, vieux style,” written during
Raimond’s incarceration after his arrest in 1793 for his activities and writing about the colony, reproduced in Gauthier,
L’aristocratie de l’épiderme (Gauthier notes this document is held at the Archives Nationales, AF II 302–2511, no. 48).
Gauthier reproduces letters between Raimond and the governor-general of Saint-Domingue, Guillaume de Bellecombe,
in which Bellecombe acknowledges receipt on 11 May 1783 of Raimond’s “Mémoire sur le sort actuel des hommes de
couleur” and states that he (Bellecombe) would pass it along to the naval minister, Castries. See Gauthier, L’aristocratie
de l’épiderme, 114. As Garrigus notes, Bellecombe directed Raimond to contact the colonial minister himself. After
traveling to France for business in 1784, Raimond delivered his mémoires to the minister in 1785 and 1786. See Garrigus,
“Opportunist or Patriot?”; see also Garrigus, Before Haiti. Aside from Gauthier and Garrigus, there are only a few works
on Raimond’s early manuscript mémoires. For one, see Michèle Duchet, “Esclavage et humanisme en 1787: Un mémoire
inédit de Saint-Lambert sur les gens de couleur,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 181 (1965): 344–48. In
another, David Geggus reproduces an extract from one of the mémoires; see Geggus, The Haitian Revolution: A Documen-
tary History (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014), 14. Raimond was not the only free man of color to lobby against color prejudice:
he mentions the existence of several other mémoires that free men of color had penned to colonial administrators regard-
ing color prejudice.
38 “Empire of prejudice”; Raimond, “1r Mémoire,” 1.
39 “Always humiliating labels”; Raimond, “3eme Mémoire,” 29.
SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 41
liberator and to end “un préjugé barbare d’où naissait la haine d’une partie des sujets de son
Roy envers une autre faible & malheureux.”40 In order to prove the injustice of this prejudicial
treatment, Raimond’s manuscript mémoires offered up scores of footnotes, definitions of terms,
and annexed documents as evidence. His fourth and final mémoire summed up the facts he

had established in the previous three in a numbered list, matching it with the corresponding
proof he had given to support each of these facts.
Raimond’s requests for reform were not radical, at least in the sense of class: he remained
committed to slavery and French colonial rule. The main argument he refuted again and again in
his texts is the notion that free men of color were interested in fomenting slave insurrection. He
reminded the minister that free men of color were themselves slaveowners, a fact that proved
their investment in maintaining the colonial slavery system (“aujourd’huy la plus intéressé à
retenir les esclaves sous le joug oula nécessité les à plaçés”) and preventing slave insurrection
and marronage (“esclaves déjà réfugiés sur des montagnes presqu’inaccessible”).41 Raimond
assured the colonial administration of free people of color’s fidelity to the colonial system of
plantation slavery, comparing the color prejudice faced by free people of color to the treatment
of enslaved people. While the enslaved had hope to one day secure their freedom, Raimond
argued, free men of color had no hope of bettering their lot and were condemned to spend
their lives in the shadow of this “injuste préjugé.”42 His frequent use of the term abolition was
thus, in the mid-1780s, focused solely on the abolition of color prejudice against free people
of color in the colony, and not the abolition of slavery.
While Raimond’s early manuscript mémoires addressed to the naval minister were not
published or “public” documents, he nevertheless intended them to be read, borrowed, and
adapted by reformers in Paris. In the context of lobbying, a mémoire like Raimond’s provided
the arguments, anecdotes, language, and evidence that reformers could take up and use in
their own mémoires and published pamphlets. What is more, while many colonial mémoires
described the conditions and cultural mores of France’s overseas territories as observed by
an outsider, Raimond’s personal account evoked pathos as an authentic representation of the
situation of people of color in Saint-Domingue for reformers to draw upon. His native-born
status lent credibility to the stories he recounted and the evidence he was entering into the
colonial record. And indeed, Raimond was wildly successful in this regard: passages from his
1780s manuscript mémoires appear repurposed in key early writings from activists involved
in the Société des Amis des Noirs. The poet Jean-François de Saint-Lambert quoted from
Raimond’s mémoires in his own manuscript mémoire addressed to the colonial minister offer-
ing advice on the necessity of reforming colonial prejudice.43 Other pamphlets that appeared
40 “Vain”; “iniquitous”; “barbaric”; “a barbaric prejudice from which arose the hatred of one part of the king’s subjects toward
a poor and unfortunate other”; Raimond, “4eme Mémoire,” 40.
41 “Today the most interested in keeping the slaves under the yoke that necessity has placed upon them”; Raimond, “1er
Mémoire,” 7. “Slaves already escaped to nearly unreachable mountains”; Raimond, “2eme Mémoire,” 19.
42 “Unjust prejudice”; Raimond, “1er Mémoire,” 2.
43 See Duchet, “Esclavage et humanisme.”
in revolutionary Paris, such as the Abbé Grégoire’s 1789 mémoire against colonial racism,
relied on Raimond’s evidence to catalog the immoral and unjust treatment of the people of
color in Saint-Domingue.44
Raimond’s lobbying took him to Paris at the start of the revolution, where he associated

with the Colons Américains lobby that affiliated with the Amis des Noirs. It was as a repre-
sentative of members of his class that Raimond penned another mémoire addressed to the
Committees of the Navy and the Colonies of the National Convention. It concerned the recent
“troubles” in the colony surrounding the French National Constituent Assembly’s 15 May
1791 decree extending political rights to a limited subset of free men of color in the colony.45
The committees had received conflicting reports from White colonists and colonists of color
on where responsibility for the 1791 uprisings lay, and thus invited colonists of both colors
“à fournir respectivement un mémoire sur cet objet” as well as on what measures to take to
return calm to the colony and bring “une réunion sincère” among citizens.46 In an effort to
preempt some of the more tendentious polemical rhetoric, the Convention required that both
sides—White colonists and free men of color—exercise restraint, requiring that “toute person-
nalité serait bannie des mémoires qui seraient présentés” and that they would not dwell on
the excès (excesses) committed by either party, instead focusing on the future and measures
the government could take to ensure unity in the colony.47
Raimond hewed mostly to the stylistic and rhetorical restraints laid out by the Conven-
tion in his mémoire, saving his fiery rhetoric for a pamphlet he published separately on the
same events.48 Still, he did not shy away from bold, shocking accusations in his mémoire—for
example, he claimed that a faction of White colonists wanted to kill all free men of color in
the colony. He focused his energy on providing evidence of these accusations: transcribing
excerpts of personal correspondence, drawing up a typescript of important documents in
annex, and attaching additional exhibits of published pamphlets and other written mémoires.
Raimond’s emphasis on evidentiary proof and forensic rhetoric in his mémoire to refute claims
made against free men of color and to prove the deleterious effects of color prejudice in the
colony are central to the vindicationism of his text.
44 Henri Grégoire, Mémoire en faveur des gens de couleur ou sang-mêlé de St.-Domingue, et des autres îles françaises de
l’Amérique (Paris: Chez Belin, 1789). On the influence of Raimond’s mémoires on Grégoire and on pamphlet culture in
revolutionary Paris more broadly, including on a certain “J. M. C. Américain,” see Garrigus, Before Haiti, 236–42.
45 Julien Raimond, Mémoire sur les causes des troubles et des désastres de la colonie de Saint-Domingue: Présenté aux
comités de Marine et des Colonies, dans les premiers jours de juin dernier, par les Citoyens de couleur; d’après l’invitation
qui leur en avait été faite par les comités (Paris: Cercle Social, 1793). On the 1791 “free colored” uprising, see Bongie, “The
Shadow of Voltaire.”
46 “To each provide a report on this subject”; “a sincere meeting”; Raimond, Mémoire sur les causes des troubles, 3.
47 “All individuality be excluded from the reports presented”; ibid.
48 Julien Raimond, Réflexions sur les véritables causes des troubles et des désastres de nos colonies (Paris, 1793). He offered
his advice to the members of the Convention for how to save the colony and concluded that they must offer a path to free-
dom for the enslaved in order to ensure their fidelity to France. He even included in his pamphlet a draft proclamation the
Convention could use that would accompany new laws guaranteeing a path to freedom for enslaved people in the French
colonies.
SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 43
While the Convention solicited Raimond’s expertise and authorized him to submit a
mémoire for consideration, the latter did not rise to the status of official government text. It
remained one of many mémoires included in the mass of documentation produced about the
troubles in the colonies. Nevertheless, it is significant that Raimond chose to make his mémoire

to the committee available to the wider public by having it printed for public consumption. He
notes in the introductory matter to the pamphlet that he submitted his mémoire to the commit-
tee and then decided to have it printed in order to “mettre la Convention entière à même de
prononcer sur l’esprit qui l’a dicté.”49 This decision in itself is not surprising—Raimond financed
scores of publications in the early 1790s to advance the cause of the gens de couleur, defend
against their detractors, and lobby for equal rights.50 His and others’ activism bore fruit: the
French Legislative Assembly passed a law on 4 April 1792 that granted equal rights to gens
de couleur, rendering moot the National Assembly’s much-contested 15 May 1791 decree that
had granted limited political rights to only “freeborn” gens de couleur. His decision to publish
the mémoire he had presented to the committee (penned either as a manuscript or printed but
not published) denotes a shift in his standing in the colony and a new audience for his appeal:
the public sphere. Indeed, the public sphere was increasingly becoming a space where gens
de couleur made their vindicationist claims. The April 1792 law marked the ascent of many
notable gens de couleur in the revolutionary period, including military men who rose through
the ranks of the French army, like Rigaud and Louverture, and civilians like Raimond, who
was named a member of the Third Civil Commission in 1796. Nonetheless, gens de couleur
fended off continual challenges from factions and lobbies in the colony and the metropole,
and faced off against each other on the battlefield and in print.
André Rigaud’s Defense and Refutation Mémoire

Tensions continued to mount between colonial administrators and gens de couleur after the
April 1792 law. This was especially the case for gens de couleur officers such as Louverture,
Rigaud, and Jean-Louis Villatte, who had risen to the rank of brigadier-general by 1796. Colonial
officials accused gens de couleur officers of racial hatred against White colonists and Black
cultivateurs. This racial-political dynamic crystallized in a series of skirmishes between colonial
officials and high-ranking officers of color in 1796: the Villatte Affair of 20 March (also known as
the Affair of 30 Ventôse) in the north, and the lesser-known Fructidor Massacre of August 1796
in the south.51 In the Villatte Affair, the gens de couleur commander of Cap Français, General
49 “Put the entire Convention in a position to opine on the spirit that dictated it”; Raimond, Mémoire sur les causes des
troubles, 4.
50 Raimond reflects at length on the financial troubles that came with his print activism in the early 1790s in his “Compte que
Julien Raimond rend au Comité de sûreté Genérale.”
51 On the Villatte Affair of 20 March and the “racialized simplifications” that were used to narrate and code the events, see
Pierrot, The Black Avenger. On the Fructidor Massacre, see Covo, “Le massacre de fructidor.” My summary of the events
that follows draws on Covo’s synthesis, as well as on original proclamations and reports published by the commissioners,
Rigaud, and Gatereau.
Jean-Louis Villatte, rebelled against the governor of Saint-Domingue, Étienne Maynaud de

Bizefranc de Laveaux. While Villatte had the support of fellow officers and many residents of
Le Cap, Laveaux had the support of Louverture, who put down Villatte’s rebellion and rescued
Laveaux. Villatte was arrested and imprisoned in France, while Laveaux promoted Louverture

to lieutenant governor of the colony for his service.52
The Fructidor Massacre of August 1796 involved another high-ranking gens de couleur
officer: André Rigaud. The exact events surround the uprising in the southern town of Les
Cayes are difficult to ascertain given the competing accounts published in the colony, the
metropole, and even the United States. In short, a French general in the Third Civil Commis-
sion, Étienne Desfourneaux, ordered the arrest of Rigaud’s men, allegedly for having plotted
against the delegation and for seditious statements against the head of the commission,
Léger-Félicité Sonthonax. Rigaud’s men fled to a fort in Les Cayes, from which they called
up cultivateurs from the region to fight for them, armed with wooden stakes, bayonets, and
pistols. The rebels maintained their insurrection in Les Cayes, executing an estimated thirty-
one agents and troops who had served under Desfourneaux.53
The commission offered its own conclusions on the officers’ wrongdoing in a proclamation
dated 23 Frimaire (13 December 1796), which it published in the colony.54 The commission
considered its delegates cleared of any wrongdoing and named Rigaud and his fellow south-
ern generals of color as the ringleaders of the insurrection (“chefs de la révolte des Cayes”).55
They accused the rebel generals of “ambition démesurée” and of using the weapons of the
“factieux, le mensonge et la calomnie,” first, to seduce “les noirs,” or formerly enslaved men,
into following them by making them believe the commission would return them to slavery
and, second, to convince free people of color that a conspiracy was afoot to deliver them “à
la proscription et à la mort.”56 The commission presented Rigaud as particularly tyrannical:
it accused him of conspiring with the rebels to hatch a plan to amplify his power, and allowing his
“satellites” to “dépouill[er], égorg[er] les amis de la France” leaving “les dépositaires de l’autorité
du gouvernement . . . entourés de cadavres ensanglantés de leurs plus fidèles défenseurs.”57
52 John Walsh notes that Villatte was acquitted by a military tribunal in France. Walsh, Free and French in the Caribbean,
166n51.
53 Covo, “Le massacre de fructidor,” 152–54. The number of victims varies in the opposing accounts; some delegates’
reports listed more than three hundred victims, while Pierre Pinchinat, a free man of color from the colony, lists forty (ibid.,
154).
54 “Proclamation du 23 Frimaire sur les événemens arrivés aux Cayes en Fructidor,” reproduced in André Rigaud, Mémoire du
général de brigade A. Rigaud, en réfutation des écrits calomnieux contre les citoyens de couleur de Saint-Domingue (Aux
Cayes, 1797). The proclamation was signed by Sonthonax, Leblanc, Raimond, and Pascal.
55 “Leaders of the revolt in les Cayes”; “Proclamation,” in Rigaud, Mémoire, 54. A word on Rigaud’s racial and class terminol-
ogy would be useful here: Rigaud referred to himself and men of his class as “Citoyens de couleur” (and occasionally
“Citoyens de 1792”). He used the designation “Nègres libres” to refer to men of African descent who had been enslaved
and emancipated before 1794 and for whom the 4 April 1792 law had also, at least legally, ended racial discrimination.
He used the designation of “Noirs” for populations who had been enslaved before 4 February 1794 and who had become
“free citizens.” The term noir was also interchangeable with the term africain, which was also used as a more specific des-
ignation for cultivateurs—agricultural laborers in the new forced labor regime of the postemancipation plantation colony.
56 “Excessive ambition”; “seditious, lies and slander”; “to banishment and death”; “Proclamation,” in Rigaud, Mémoire, 49.
57 “Skin, slit the throats of the friends of France”; “guardians of government authority . . . surrounded with the bloody cadav-
ers of their most faithful defenders”; ibid., 52. Pierrot summarizes the accusations as “mulatto deviousness in a plan to
SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 45
The commission lamented that innocent men had been seduced and manipulated by these
bad actors, and encouraged free men of color who might have joined up with the “rebel”
generals to switch over to the commissioners’ side.
In response to these incendiary, racialized accusations from colonial officials, Rigaud

penned his defense mémoire.58 The document served to justify his conduct, defend his repub-
lican virtue, refute the accusations leveled against him and men of his class, and vindicate
himself and gens de couleur in the eyes of the Directory and in the court of public opinion.59
And while the commission’s proclamation was not itself an official judgment of culpability
and exoneration (this was in the hands of the executive Directory in France), the commis-
sion still retained the power and standing to produce official reports—that is, official docu-
ments with the French government’s imprimatur.60 It also maintained the verdictive authority
to deem Rigaud a “rebel” general and thus deprive him of the discursive authority his rank
and position usually conferred to him. That is, while a general like Rigaud in theory had the
power and imprimatur to produce such official documentation, especially in the absence of
government commissioners, as soon as he was designated a “rebel” he lacked the status
to introduce anything official into the record of his own accord. A mémoire was thus one of
the few legible and quasi-official forms that his defense and vindication could take in order
to refute the narrative the commission had created of actions by gens de couleur—of lying
conspirators trying to erect a regime of mixed-race supremacy in the colony. Rigaud provided
ample evidence in footnotes and excerpted documents, which he coupled with the evidence
of his and his compatriots’ unwavering commitment to the ideals and interests of the French
Republic. Notably, he did not merely submit his mémoire to the Directory for consideration
but also published it for judgment—and vindication—in the public sphere.
Rigaud mounted his defense on the principle of colorblind republicanism embodied by
his class, to which he contrasted the actions of colonial agents, administrators, and especially
White colonists. He chronicled the unjust and inhumane treatment suffered by free men of
color, as well as their enthusiastic defense of the French Revolution and their eventual triumph
destroy whites and fool blacks to assert mulatto supremacy on the island” (The Black Avenger, 106). On the “mulatto/a
vengeance narrative,” see Daut, Tropics of Haiti.
58 On the genre of the “defense pamphlet,” see Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), chap. 2. Freeman connects the defense pamphlet to the mémoire judiciaire.
59 As part of his public relations strategy, Rigaud appears to have collaborated with the secretary-polemicist Gatereau to
produce a separate pamphlet in defense of Rigaud’s character and conduct during the Fructidor Massacre. Published
under the anagrammatic pseudonym Mandar-Argeaut, the pamphlet Quelques éclaircissemens sur les troubles survenus
dans le département du Sud de Saint Domingue, en fructidor an 4ème (août 1796 vieux style) (Hamburg: P. F. Fauche,
1797) reproduces most of the elements of Rigaud’s mémoire in a different form. The pamphlet refuted the civil commis-
sion’s proclamation by asserting the same account of the events, the same arguments, and the same accusations against
the commission (and Sonthonax in particular). Manuel Covo suggests that the place of publication was as false as the
pen name, and that it was likely produced in Philadelphia; see Covo, “Le massacre de fructidor.” On Mandar-Argeaut
[Gatereau]’s pamphlet, see also Pierrot, The Black Avenger.
60 Article IV of the commission’s proclamation stated, “Le jugement des coupables dans les événements des Cayes, ainsi que
l’examen définitif de cette affaire, sont renvoyés au directoire exécutif de France, et en tant que besoin au corps législatif”
(“The judgment of guilty parties in events in les Cayes as well as the definitive investigation of this affair are referred to the
Executive Directory of France and, as necessary, to the legislature”). “Proclamation,” in Rigaud, Mémoire, 57–58.
over “les vils esclaves du despotisme.”61 He detailed their bravery, love of liberty, and zealous
attachment to France in the face of the vile, perfidious plotting of the so-called enemies of the
republic, and he shone a light on these factions’ plots to annihilate free people of color in the
colony. Rigaud positioned himself and all free people of color (“freeborn” and “freed” people

of African descent) as the staunchest defenders of the French Revolution, the republic, and
of liberty in his mémoire. They were faithful paragons of virtue who sacrificed their lives to
defend the colony for France, many times from its own internal counterrevolutionaries, often
without any support from the government. As a general and a de facto colonial administra-
tor before the arrival of the Third Civil Commission, Rigaud described his leadership style as
meritocratic and based in republican virtue, and he maintained that justice guided his treatment
of all citizens.62 He also provided evidence of his commitment to the prosperity of the colony
and listed his personal achievements when colonial administrators were recalled to France
and he was left mostly to his own devices to protect the colony and maintain order. He argued
that under his leadership, “l’empire de la justice fut rétabli,” and anarchy and confusion gave
way to order and peace.63
Rigaud defended himself against the incendiary accusations of barbarity and tyranny
by utilizing the trope of reversal, arguing that it was those who would sow division between
citizens for their own gain who were the true barbarians: “Vous me dites barbare! Eh! c’est
vous qui l’êtes et non pas moi.”64 To justify his participation in the insurrection in Les Cayes,
he accused the commissioner’s military generals Rey and Desfourneaux of having “allumé le
feu de la guerre civile” and Sonthonax of sowing discord in the colony that had only begun
to “refleurir et à renaître de ces cendres.”65 Within this metaphoric frame, Rigaud presented
his role as responding to the disaster: he put out the fire that the commission’s delegates had
started, saving those men, women, and children who were in danger in the melee, and returned
“order” to the south, which is to say the laborers to their plantations.
As with Raimond, then, Rigaud’s interest was in maintaining the colony’s prosperity, secu-
rity, and “order” based on a plantation agricultural regime. The fact that the rebels conscripted
cultivateurs (agricultural laborers or “les Africains”) from plantations surrounding Les Cayes to
support their insurrection undercut much of the basis of Rigaud’s defense and vindication. For
this reason, Rigaud insisted that free men of color did not incite or entice them to support the
uprising against the colonial administrators. Through a series of natural disaster metaphors, he
described how formerly enslaved men descended from the mountains and voluntarily took up
arms when they learned that French administrators were threatening the lives and liberty of their
defenders, free men of color. When formerly enslaved laborers learned “qu’on avait attenté à la
61 “The vile slaves of despotism,” by which he meant White counterrevolutionary colonists. Rigaud, Mémoire, 8.
62 See ibid., 27.
63 “The empire of justice was reestablished”; ibid., 25.
64 “You call me barbaric! It is you who are the barbarians, not me!”; ibid., 44.
65 “Lit the flame of civil war”; “flourish again and spring up from its ashes”; ibid., 44, 56.
SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 47
liberté et à la vie de leurs défenseurs,” they became a flood, an electrified storm: “Des torrens
se précipitent des mornes et viennent grossir ceux de la plaine; les Africans s’électrisent, ils
volent au secours de leur frères.”66 Rigaud metamorphosed the subsequent bloodshed in
which they participated as a natural disaster set off by the commission’s perfidiousness: “Ce

volcan affreux dont les délégués et Desfourneaux avaient excité l’éruption.”67 Rigaud’s use
of natural disaster metaphors and his story of the agricultural laborers’ spontaneous actions
were meant to illustrate free men of color’s republican virtue and deflect accusations that they
were the source of unrest in the colonies.
Formally, Rigaud’s mémoire performs its vindicationism in a particularly clever way. He
proposes at the end of the mémoire a “développement et réfutation” of the commission’s
proclamation by reproducing the original text on the left side of the page and offering his own
rebuttal on the right side.68 This allows Rigaud to restage the conflict, forcing Sonthonax and
the civil commissioners to be present (textually) for his response and rebuttal. The visual tactic
of side-by-side response, in which Rigaud’s refutation spills over into the original proclama-
tion, also appears to unweave and unravel the official proclamation.69 Rigaud develops this
process of unweaving or textile refutation by repeatedly dismissing the commission’s written
account as a woven fabric of deception and slander: “Il est donc évident que la proclamation
de Sonthonax, du 23 Frimaire, a été non seulement dictée par la partialité la plus injuste, et
enfantée par le machiavélisme le plus atroce, mais encore qu’elle n’est qu’un tissu d’impostures
et de calomnies.”70 In a forensic mode that is unmistakably a closing legal argument, Rigaud
concludes by repeating the same phrase paragraph after paragraph—“J’ai prouvé par les
faits que . . . ”—then summarizing the main pieces of evidence, anecdotes, and testimony
he provided.71
The divergent outcomes for Louverture and Rigaud after the 1796 uprisings in the
north and the south—Louverture quelled Villatte’s uprising and was promoted to the rank
of lieutenant governor, while Rigaud was accused of fomenting an insurrection against the
commission—hinted at the coming civil war between the two generals. It is notable, however,
that the executive Directory never did make a determination on Rigaud’s actions during the
66 “That they had violated the life and liberty of their defenders”; “Torrents streamed down the mountains and swelled the
ranks of those in the plains; the Africans were electrified; they flew to the aid of their brothers”; ibid., 43.
67 “That awful volcano whose eruption was incited by Desfourneaux and the delegates”; ibid., 45.
68 “Development and refutation”; ibid., 47.
69 Readers versed in the early writing of Haitian independence will find familiar elements in Rigaud’s mémoire. The formal
dialogic or line-by-line refutation style was widespread in pamphlet writing under Henry Christophe. See Stieber, Haiti’s
Paper War. There is ample influence from eighteenth-century French writing as well: the forensic rhetoric, moral outrage,
metaphors of veiling and unveiling, light and dark, perfidy and seduction, the trope of reversal, and metaphors of natural
disasters abound in the work of Voltaire and Louis-Sébastien Mercier, with whom Rigaud seems in intertextual conversa-
tion. Indeed, the epigraph to Rigaud’s Mémoire is adapted from Voltaire. We might push this intertextual dialogue even
further: in addition to his theatrical, philosophical, and polemical works, Voltaire produced scores of judicial mémoires in
the mid-1700s. See Maza, “Le tribunal de la nation.”
70 “It is therefore evident that Sonthonax’s proclamation of 23 Frimaire was not only dictated by the most unjust bias and
brought forth by the most dreadful Machiavellianism, it is also nothing but a web of lies and slander”; Rigaud, Mémoire,
59–60.
71 “I have proved by the facts that . . .”; ibid., throughout.
events of August 1796 and the accusations Sonthonax and the commission levied against
him. His mémoire would appear to have had its desired effect: he presented his narrative and
set of facts for consideration by the executive Directory and was not charged.72 He won, if not
vindication, then at least approbation. The fallout from the events of 1796—the commission’s

attempts to constitutionalize the territory and curb Rigaud’s power in the south, the questions
of who had the legitimate authority to act on behalf of the southern province, and the profu-
sion of documentation from the different parties defending their conduct and accusing their
opponent—presaged the coming civil war in the colony. The War of the South, or the War of
Knives, was a brief but devastating confrontation from 1799 to 1800 that pitted Rigaud against
Louverture for control of the colony. While the confrontation later developed into a full-blown
civil war, it began as a paper war between the two rival generals, who traded slanderous
accusations in pamphlets and proclamations in 1799.73 Louverture’s forces quickly overpow-
ered the pro-Rigaud forces in the north, but it took much longer to bring the south under his
control. Louverture’s lieutenant Jean-Jacques Dessalines eventually defeated Rigaud’s forces
in the south in August 1800 and Rigaud fled to France. He returned in 1802 as part of Charles
Leclerc’s expeditionary force, sent to the colony by Bonaparte to deport Louverture to France
and reassert the first consul’s control over the colony.
But before Louverture was tricked, captured, and deported on 7 June 1802, it was Rigaud
who was expelled from the colony, in March 1802, mere weeks after disembarking, apparently
for having threatened the command of one of Leclerc’s generals in the south.74 He charted
a path that Louverture soon followed: he and his family were taken to Le Cap where they
boarded a ship bound for the port city of Brest on the Atlantic coast, devoid of most of their
belongings. Rigaud was placed under police surveillance and transferred to various cities
across the country, and was even arrested and briefly incarcerated in the Fort de Joux prison,
his papers confiscated.75 This is where Rigaud’s story departs from Louverture’s: while Rigaud
was quickly released, Louverture would spend nearly a year, the final months of his life, in his
icy prison cell in the Jura mountains.
72 See Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, vol. 3 (Port-au-Prince: J. Courtois, 1848–49), for an extended discussion of the
events that eventually led to the Directory’s nonjudgment on Rigaud’s actions in August 1796. These included the presen-
tation of several mémoires written on his behalf by southern delegates who were finally able to have an audience with the
executive Directory after a brief delay in British custody. In addition to these submissions to the record, Rigaud’s case in
the eyes of the Directory could have only been helped by his continued successful defense of the republic against English
aggression in the south.
73 For the War of Knives as a “propaganda war” between Louverture and Rigaud, see Geggus, The Haitian Revolution, 139.
74 Claude B. Auguste, “André Rigaud, Leader des anciens libres,” Revue de la Société haïtienne d’Histoire, de Géographie
et de Géologie, no. 187 (March 1996): 1–29. See also Michel R. Doret, “Les trois séjours d’André Rigaud en Métropole,”
Revue de la Société haïtienne d’Histoire, de Géographie et de Géologie, nos. 180–181 (July 1994): 56–85.
75 On the timing and uncertainty surrounding Rigaud’s incarceration and release, see Doret, “Les trois séjours d’André
Rigaud.”
SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 49
Louverture’s Defense and Protest Mémoire

Toussaint Louverture’s mémoire makes clear demands for present justice and vindication.
In fact, there is very little in his mémoire that fits into the category of autobiography or ego-
document in the modern sense of these generic conventions. Yes, Louverture wrote in the

first person and yes, he recounted his actions and even sentiments. But considered within
the larger context of bureaucratic writing in revolutionary Saint-Domingue that I have just
presented, it is clear that his mémoire is a military bureaucratic text. He states his purpose and
audience plainly. The point of his mémoire is to offer a faithful accounting of his actions to the
putatively republican French government under Bonaparte: “Il et de mon devoire de rendre
au gouvernement francois un conpte éxait de ma conduit je raconterait les faits avec toute la
naivetet et la franchise dun anciens militaire an y a joutant les recflecxions qui se presenteront
naturellement, en fin je dirai la verite fut elle conte cante moi-même.”76 His mémoire then jumps
into his accounting of the events of 1802: the arrival of Leclerc’s expedition, what Louverture
deemed the unlawful and dishonorable actions of Leclerc and his troops, a justification of the
decisions Louverture made in response, and finally the degrading, treacherous circumstances
surrounding his arrest, deportation, and imprisonment without trial in France.
The bureaucratic codes of mémoire clarify a number of aspects of Louverture’s text. First,
we recognize the constraints that Louverture was under in terms of the type of text he could
produce. A prisoner, he was no longer imbued with the authority to produce the same official,
authoritative documents he had signed his name to during his career in Saint-Domingue.77 A
mémoire was the proper genre available to him to petition the Consulate to provide him the
military tribunal he was owed, as would be any other revolutionary general in Saint-Domingue.
As for the form and generic conventions of the mémoire specifically, we can assume that
as a high-ranking French military officer and later governor-general of Saint-Domingue, he
was intimately familiar with the genre. He likely wrote, received, and signed off on a number
of bureaucratic mémoires from military subordinates and inhabitants of the colony. He was
undoubtedly well-versed in the norms, forms, and requirements of bureaucratic writing, given
his long service as a general and later governor of the island.
Indeed, Louverture emphasizes his own appropriate military procedures and decorum and
his expectations of honor, candor, and zealous defense of the republic throughout—arguing that
he upheld these expectations while Leclerc did not. Louverture focuses on Leclerc’s actions
76 “It is my duty to give the French government an exact account of my conduct. I will recount the facts with the naivete and
the candor of a former military man, adding the reflections that come naturally to mind. In short, I will tell the truth, even if
it is counted against me”; Louverture, “Mémoire,” 5. I am quoting from the manuscript text written in Louverture’s hand.
It is worth noting that the secretary’s manuscript version of this passage, as well as the final version sent to Bonaparte,
removed “cante” (perhaps assuming it was a repetition in error) and reproduced the passage as “fut elle contre moi même”
(“even if it is against me”). On Louverture’s sparse use of punctuation and accents, and for general insights on his spelling,
see Desormeaux, Mémoires, 169n1.
77 The 1801 Constitution is the pinnacle of such official, declarative writing, though Louverture’s entire career is marked by an
extremely rich official documentary production. See Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative.
that violated the customs and formalities of French Republican military bureaucracy in his
treatment of Louverture—unjust and unbecoming treatment that the deposed French general
argued was the cause of all of the disasters and bloodshed in the colony that occurred in the
aftermath. For example, he accused Leclerc of breaking military procedure and failing to fulfill

the basic wartime formalities when his expedition arrived in Saint-Domingue, failing to notify
Louverture of his powers and orders from the French government. Louverture maintained that
he was forced to take up a defensive position against Leclerc’s unlawful entry, and that Leclerc
used this as a pretense to declare Louverture an outlaw and order his arrest. He also accused
Leclerc of giving his word of honor and failing to uphold it, which was a violation of the law:
“An me don n’ant sa parolle, et ne pas la tenire cet man quié a l honneur; promi la protection
du gouvernement, et agire d’un notre maniere; ce violé les lois.”78 Louverture maintained that
Leclerc had given him his word that he would provide the general with government protection
in exchange for his surrender but instead lured him into a trap, arrested him, and locked him
away on a ship bound for France.
For Louverture, this unjust, dishonorable treatment was evidence of Leclerc’s prejudice
against him. Reflecting on Leclerc’s proclamation of Louverture and his revolutionary generals
as outlaws, Louverture concluded that he was not accorded the same honorable treatment
conferred to other military men because of his color (“Sans doute je doit cette meprise a ma
cou-leur”). But, Louverture asked Bonaparte directly, rhetorically in his mémoire, “Ma couleur
matele enpéché des servis ma patrie avec zele et fidelite; la couleur de mon corp nuit elle a
mon honneur et a mon courage.”79 Here, Louverture held up the principles of universal equality
that the French Republic was supposed to exemplify, and which he himself embodied, and
asked that they be applied to rectify his unjust treatment.
In contrast to his depiction of Leclerc as dishonorable and prejudiced, Louverture insisted
on his own honorable behavior, his embrace of the principles of the French Republic and his
zealous defense of his homeland, the French homeland: “Pans dant que la france faisait la
geurre et combatre avec Sés enemis ne pou vant pas venire dant ces colonie nous portait des
soucoure jai tous faite pour la lui conservé jus qua larrivé du general leclerc . . . en nespérant
qu’a la paix les gouvernement au roit declaré que larmé de St. Domingue a bien servis leur
patri.”80 In addition to his service to the republic, Louverture provided evidence by way of
examples (and offered thirty or more examples upon request) where he had given his word of
honor and upheld it, even against the most unsavory opponents, in the interest of defending
the honor and dignity of “mon gouvernement” (the French government).
78 “Giving me his word and not upholding it is to fail in one’s honor; to promise the protection of the government and act
otherwise is to violate the laws”; Louverture, “Mémoire,” 18.
79 “No doubt I owe this error to my color”; “Did my color ever prevent me from serving my fatherland with zeal and fidelity? Is
the color of my body detrimental to my honor and my courage?”; ibid. On the link to Jean-François Ducis’s 1792 transla-
tion of Othello in this passage, see Desormeaux, Mémoires, 190.
80 “While France was waging war against her enemies and could not give us assistance in the colonies, I did everything to
conserve it until General Leclerc’s arrival . . . hoping that in peace the government would declare that the army of Saint-
Domingue had served their homeland well”; Louverture, “Mémoire,” 19.
SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 51
Finally, the genre of the mémoire sheds light on Louverture’s attachment to his letters
and correspondence, his despondency at having them confiscated, and his eagerness to
reconnect with them when he arrived at the Fort de Joux. In addition to a military tribunal,
Louverture demanded that he be given access to his voluminous correspondence that had

been seized when he was arrested: “Je demande que le general leclerc et moi paraisions en
sanble de vant un tribunal et que le gouvernement ordonné que lon ma porte toute mes piece
de corres pondance par ce moÿent lon verras mon innonsance et tout ce que jai faite pour la
republique.”81 Scholars have tended to present Louverture’s attachment to his written material
as evidence of his literacy and “civilization.”82 When considered in the context of the mémoire,
however, his attachment to his vast textual archive and his stringent demands that justice
be done by their return to his possession was an essential piece of his defense strategy. His
papers contained all of the letters, evidence, and documentation that he wanted to excerpt,
quote, and reference for his mémoire and his ultimate legal defense. He expressed faith that
this ample documentation would provide him the evidence, the proof he needed for his argu-
ments in order to refute the accusations made against him: “Je nai rien a redouter cette corres
pondance seule suffit pour me justifie aux yeux du government Equitable qui doit me juge.”83
In this light, the confiscation of his notebooks and papers robbed him of evidence and
pieces of text that were essential to his case and to his freedom and vindication. He made
do with what few documents he did have in his possession, reproducing some letters in full,
which he would have copied from those in his possession, along with snippets of other letters,
documents, and conversations that he reproduced from memory or his own notes.84 Here,
sampling and modeling would have played an important role, as scholars have noted the differ-
ent registers and levels of correctness in his writing in different parts of the mémoire, which
would seem to be attributable to the documents to which he had access and the formalities,
forms, and turns of phrase that he could copy and repurpose.85 But without his own papers,
he could not provide the textual evidence to vindicate himself. “Arrete abitraire ment sans men
tendre ni me dire pourquoi; en parré toute mes avoire, pillie toute mas famille an general, saisire
mes papier et les gard der”—is this not, Louverture asked, the equivalent of cutting off a man’s
leg and telling him to walk?86 Cutting out a man’s tongue and telling him to talk? Arresting a
man but then taking away his capacity to mount a defense, “nes ce pas en teré un homme
81 “I am requesting that General Leclerc and I appear together before a tribunal and that the government order that I be
brought all my correspondence. By these means, my innocence and all that I have done for the republic will be seen”;
ibid., 3.
82 Marlene Daut calls this tendency the “Enlightenment literacy narrative” attached to Louverture. See Daut, Tropics of Haiti,
50.
83 “I have nothing to fear. This correspondence alone is enough to vindicate me in the eyes of the Just government whose
duty it is to judge me”; Louverture, “Mémoire,” 19.
84 He likely arrived at the Fort de Joux with documents on his person that he was able to use until they too were confiscated.
Girard, The Memoir of Toussaint Louverture, 129n164.
85 Walsh, Free and French in the Caribbean; Girard, The Memoir of Toussaint Louverture.
86 “Arrested arbitrarily without hearing me or telling me why, all my assets taken, my family in general plundered, my papers
seized and kept”; Louverture, “Mémoire,” 19.
vivant?”87 Here again, the bureaucratic mémoire genre offers additional depth and clarity on
this powerful passage. Louverture knew the proper bureaucratic form to contest his arrest,
defend his service, refute accusations against him, and demand justice by way of a military
tribunal. But without his written archive, he was unable either to adequately express himself

in the conventions and norms the form required or to offer proper, authoritative evidence to
support his claims. Louverture thus expressed moral indignation and righteous outrage at the
injustice of his treatment. He protested the impossible position his government had put him
in. To arrest a man is one thing, but to take away any of the tools that would allow him to seek
justice, this is a death sentence.88
The bureaucratic mémoire genre makes clear the legal, administrative channels through
which Louverture assiduously worked to seek justice and the cruelty of Bonaparte’s refusal to
accept his attempt as legitimate. The bureaucratic mémoire and its longer tradition in revolution-
ary Saint-Domingue shed light on the vindicationist elements of Louverture’s text especially:
the protest of his arrest; the maintenance of his innocence; the insistence on his dishonorable,
illegitimate arrest and deportation; his prejudicial treatment; the confiscation of his archive;
his performance of devotion to the French Republic; and the failure of republicanism to save
him, all carefully supported through evidence. The power and fervor of Louverture’s mémoire
crashes against the silence of the first consul. Bonaparte never responded. Louverture never
received the tribunal or the justice he demanded.
The Archive of (In)Justice

What does reading Louverture’s mémoire look like when placed in the larger context of bureau-
cratic writing from revolutionary Saint-Domingue and especially the mémoires of Raimond and
Rigaud that preceded it? The mémoire genre materializes the legal, bureaucratic channels
through which Louverture worked to seek justice and the forensic rhetoric of protest, evidence,
and defense that he engaged. The text’s power—and it is indeed powerful to read—resides in
the immediacy of these demands: the fervor with which he makes his appeals, presents his
evidence, and righteously demands that he be granted a tribunal so that he might see justice
done. Even if Louverture was resigned to his fate, even if he knew that Bonaparte had no
intention of seeing justice done, the bureaucratic genre encourages us to read the mémoire
beyond a personal monument or posthumous securing of his reputation. A testimony for the
archive of justice, perhaps. A recording of the injustice faced by a man who knew that if his
testimony did not matter then, it might matter at some future time.
The elements of the mémoire in revolutionary Saint-Domingue that I have outlined here—
gathering and presenting evidence, refuting claims, and protesting unjust treatment—should
87 “Is this not burying a man alive?”; ibid.

88 See Marlene Daut, “The Wrongful Death of Toussaint Louverture,” History Today, 2020, www.historytoday.com/archive
/feature/wrongful-death-Toussaint-louverture.
SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 53
be considered as part of the Black vindicationist tradition. In the case of Haiti, these rhetorical
strategies were central to postindependence writing in an inhospitable Atlantic world. The
rhetoric of protest persisted because it had to. Independent Haitians wrote from a position
of verdictive authority that went unrecognized in the wider Atlantic world—officially unrecog-

nized until 1825, and then still unofficially unrecognized as notions of “civilization” and “race”
continued to exclude Haiti from the bounds of the Western family of nations.89 We see this
vindicationist rhetoric at work in one of the first texts published in postindependence Haiti,
Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’Hayti, published in 1804.90
Though written from Boisrond-Tonnerre’s position of verdictive authority as a senior officer and
secretary to Dessalines in independent Haiti, the text nevertheless still employs the forensic
rhetoric and evidence-based protest and vindication of the colonial-era mémoires. It presents
a compilation of colonial-era evidence of French violence and inhumane treatment of the
enslaved and insurgent revolutionaries; a compendium of their mistreatment that justified—and
vindicated—their military comportment against the French army and the new nation’s overthrow
of their colonial oppressor. Indeed, this forensic protest rhetoric of citation and evidence to
persuade and refute is one of the hallmarks of early postindependence Haitian writing. As
Hénock Trouillot argued in his sociological history of Haitian literature, Haitian literature has
always been a “littérature de combat.”91 Evidence, protest, and defense remained necessary;
the discursive battle for vindication continued.
Finally, a reading of Louverture’s mémoire in the context of bureaucratic writing in revolu-
tionary Saint-Domingue reveals the limits of the genre to realize justice in the present. There
are the limits of bureaucracy and the justice system itself: if mémoire was the correct form, it
was also one of the few forms he had at his disposal to protest his treatment and seek justice.
There are the limitations of the genre of the mémoire under Bonaparte’s Consulate: Louverture’s
righteous indignation, performance of republican virtue, and textual vindication held even less
meaning after the coup of 18 Brumaire. There are the limits of French republicanism most of all,
impotent in the face of the consul’s consolidation of power. Liberty, fraternity, and colorblind
equality proved hollow when Louverture needed them the most. And yet Louverture wrote.
For justice in the present and—or—for justice at some future time. His mémoire was a marker.
Not of his tomb or his past glory but of the ideals of the French Republic as they were rapidly
receding. He committed his protest to the archive, hewed closely to the codes, formalities,
and constraints of the genre to render his protest bureaucratically legible to ensure that the
evidence of the republic’s injustice and betrayal would endure. In many ways, the elements of
89 Julia Gaffield, “The Racialization of International Law after the Haitian Revolution: The Holy See and National Sovereignty,”
American Historical Review 125, no. 3 (2020): 841–68.
90 Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’Hayti: Par l’adjudant général Boisrond-Tonnerre (Des-
salines: Imprimerie centrale du Gouvernement, 1804). Julia Gaffield’s research shows references to the document being
sent to Robert Sutherland (WO 1/75, the National Archives, London). Joseph Saint-Rémy also published a new edition of
Boisrond-Tonnerre’s text in Paris in 1851.
91 “Combat literature”; Trouillot, Les origines sociales de la littérature haïtienne.
Louverture’s mémoire are what persist in nineteenth-century Black vindicationist writing: the
incandescent protestation, the righteous indignation, the continued persistence in document-
ing the injustice of enslavement and of inequality, the insistence that recording this evidence
mattered, if only in exposing how willingly the positivist, “civilized” world dismissed it.

Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the feedback of David Bell, Rafe Blaufarb, Ashley Cohen, Julia Gaffield, John Garrigus,
Ben Kafka, Grégory Pierrot, Dixa Ramírez, Caroline Sherman, John Walsh, Julia Young, participants in
the Catholic University Department of History colloquium, and the anonymous reviewers for different
elements of this piece.

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small axe 67 • March 2022 • DOI 10.1215/07990537-9724037 © Small Axe, Inc.

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Mémoire and Vindicationism

administrative register can denote collections or multiples of the aforementioned documents,

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Other readings of Louverture’s text have explored it as an example of life-writing, history,

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18 Desormeaux, “The First of the (Black) Memorialists.”

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32 Daut, Baron de Vastey.

Julien Raimond’s Lobbyist Mémoires

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André Rigaud’s Defense and Refutation Mémoire

Jean-Louis Villatte, rebelled against the governor of Saint-Domingue, Étienne Maynaud de

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Louverture’s Defense and Protest Mémoire

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The Archive of (In)Justice

87 “Is this not burying a man alive?”; ibid.

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