Black Jacobins: Towards a Genealogy o f a Transatlantic Trope, Lecture notes of French

Download Black Jacobins: Towards a Genealogy o f a Transatlantic Trope and more Lecture notes French in PDF only on Docsity! C hapter 1 Black Jacobins: Towards a Genealogy o f a Transatlantic Trope Raphael Hörmann The trope of the Black Jacobins epitomizes transatlantic revolutionary cross currents and the close nexus of the fundamental transformations in the Atlantic world during the Age of Revolution. While the French Revolution pre cipitated slave revolts in the Caribbean, the revolutionary events in the Atlan- tic world, namely the Haitian Revolution, had decisive repercussions on the revolution in the métropole.1 While the trope of the Black Jacobins has been prominent in the discourse on transatlantic revolutions ever since, its genealo- gy has rarely been explored; a lacuna that this essay seeks to address. Trinidad-born Marxist C.L.R. James was the first to theorize these transat lantic interactions in the trope of the Black Jacobins in his ground-breaking history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938/63).2 The trope has become almost synon- ymous with James’ history, but his positions can be fruitfully contrasted with earlier uses of images depicting the Black Jacobins. Moreover, despite height- ened recent engagement with his eponymous history, James’ contradictory uses of this trope have remained curiously underexplored.3 Thus, an exposi- tion of James’ deployment of the Black Jacobin trope is absolutely essential here. In his study, James casts one of the major leaders of the Haitian Revo- lution, Toussaint Louverture, and, simultaneously, the slave masses as Black 1 Cf. David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick G eggus, A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution a n d the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Cf. David Patrick Geggus, ed., The Impact o f the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2001). 2 C. L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture a n d the San Domingo Revolution (2nd ed.) (London, etc.: Penguin, 2001). 3 For recent key works revisiting C.L.R. James’ Black Jacobins, see David Scott, Conscripts o f Modernity: The Tragedy o f Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), Christian Hogsbjerg, C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2014) and Christian Hogsbjerg & Charles Forsdick, eds., The Black Jacobins Reader (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2017). Jacobins. As he insists, both were fueled by French radical revolutionary ideol ogy, but adapted this Jacobin ideology to suit their own purposes in fighting (or leading) a slave revolution by diasporic Africans. In spite of James’ major achievements in theorizing the trope of the Black Jacobins, this figure is not James’ invention. O n the contrary, it dates back as far as the Haitian Revolution itself, as this essay will demonstrate. The key difference to James’ emphatically positive, socio-revolutionary and race revolutionary understanding of the Black Jacobins is that most Western contemporaries perceived these revolutionary qualities as transgressive, an archistic and demonic. The Black Jacobins trope was intended to demonize the Haitian slave revolutionaries rather than extol their merits as fighters for emancipation. W hat for James became a trope of radical liberation entered history as a trope of horror. This essay seeks to reconstruct the history of the transatlantic transfor mation of the trope of the Black Jacobins, from its connotations of horror to those of revolutionary emancipation. It avers that from the nineteenth century onwards, protagonists of the Black Atlantic, who belonged to a transnational and transatlantic network of often radical figures of the African diaspora, like James himself did later, played a key role in this reinterpretation. 1 “It was gravely inaccurate in fact:” C. L. R. James’ Black Jacobins and Misappropriation In what is not only the most famous but also one of the most sustained engage ments with the trope of the Black Jacobins, James identifies the beginnings of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) as its birthplace. Forming “one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement,”4 the Haitian Revolu tion marks the only successful slave revolution in modern history, and just as importantly, it also constitutes one of the first anti-colonial revolutions in the Americas: former slaves defeated Napoleons troops and founded the “Black Republic’’ of Haiti in 1804. This “double revolution” overthrew slavery and colonialism in what had been the most profitable Caribbean colony.5 More over, as this essay will demonstrate, it spawned a transatlantic discourse that frequently equated slave revolution with lower-class social revolution. 4 Ibid., xviii. 5 Anthony Bouges, Empire o f Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom (N-H- Hanover: Dartmouth Col- lege Press: University Press of New England, 2010), 114. The Black Jacobins, the French peasant revolt of 1788/89 “confined its atten tion to things.”13 By contrast, the slaves destroyed both their masters’ property (which they were a part of) and killed their masters and their masters’ families. While James historically inaccurately contends that “like revolutionary peas- ants everywhere, [the slaves] aimed at the extermination of their oppressors,” slavery’s terror regime did indeed require the extermination of their masters if the slaves were to retain any hope of keeping the freedom they fought for.14 Whereas the Saint-Dominguean slaves, thus, were clearly under a misappre hension when they regarded the initial peasant revolts of the French Revolution as slave revolts, James paradoxically claims that they grasped the essence of the French Revolution. What then was the “spirit of the thing,” as James offhanded- ly and provocatively puts it, which led the slaves in the French colony of Saint- Domingue to mount the massive slave revolt that marked the beginning of the Haitian Revolution? James’ cryptic remark, I would suggest, refers to the radical re interpretation of the Rights of Man and Citizen that the slaves undertook through their revolutionary actions. They radically extended the validity of these rights in terms of race and class, albeit not gender.15 Although stopping short of the goal of “universal emancipation,”16 the slaves adopted a considerably more radical, uni versalist interpretation of the Rights of Man than the bourgeois French revolu tionaries had ever intended. As James suggests, it was this misappropriation that pitted the slaves into conflict with French revolutionary government until the 1794 abolition of slavery, which was, in turn, a result of the Haitian Revolution. Moreover, the slogan of French Revolution, liberté, égalité, fraternité, had a fundamentally different meaning to the slaves than to the French bourgeoisie. 13 Christian H ogsbjerg, C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain (Durham NCf^D-uke University Press, 2014), 82. 14 C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture a n d the San Domingo Revolution (2nd ed.) (London etc.: Penguin 2001), 69. 15 See Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation. The Haitian Revolution a n d the Radical Enlight enm en t (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), for a philosophical-political investigation into the Haitian Revolution’s promise of universal emancipation. For dis cussions of the gender limitations of the French and Haitian Revolutions, see Laurent Dubois, Gendered Freedom, “Citoyennes and War in the Revolutionary French Caribbean” in Karen Hagemann, GesaMettele, and Jane Rendall, eds., Gender; War and Politics: Trans- atlantic Perspectives, 1 7 7 5 -1 8 3 0 , (Houndsmill: Macmillans, 2010), 58-70; Shanti Marie Singham, “Betwixt Cattle and Men: Jews, Blacks and Women, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man” in D.K.V. Kley ed., The French Idea o f Freedom: The Old Regime a n d the Declaration o f Rights /?/27^(StanfordrGA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 114-153. 16 Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation. The Haitian Revolution a n d the Radical Enlighten- m en t (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008). 5 What was at stake for the slaves — in contrast to the French bourgeoisie and the Saint-Domingue colonists - was not economic liberalization or political repre sentation; it was freedom from chattel slavery. Most importantly, the slaves re ferred to freedom in very palpable and tangible ways: not as some abstract idea, such as political freedom, but freedom from being mere objects and property of the masters, as was their legal status as chattel slaves. However, it would be an exaggeration to conclude, as Cedric Robinson does, that James implied that “bourgeois culture and thought and ideology were irrelevant to the development of revolutionary consciousness among Black and other Third World peoples.”17 In contrast to Robinson, James follows Marx and does not repudiate the revolutionary achievements of the European bourgeoisie. Instead he empha sizes how the colonial subaltern, the African Caribbean, decisively contributed to what has often been misrepresented as the chronicle of European political thought: human rights. Instead of rejecting European bourgeois revolution ary ideology, James’ Black Jacobins redefined, universalized and radicalized the Rights of Man (and thus exposed their racial and social limitations); they even went beyond the definition of “Liberty,” meaning freedom from slavery rather than political freedom. “Equality” for them meant something very dif- ferent than it did for the French bourgeoisie. Rather than just calling for legal equality as citizens instead of being chattel slaves (in itself an unprecedented revolutionary demand), they called for even more: racial and social equality. “Fraternity” seemed to include an element of inter-racial, proto-proletarian solidarity with the “white slaves” of Europe. In sum, the slaves’ misappropria tion revealed the profoundly radical potential that the Rights of Man harbored. These demands included an end not just to slavery, but to socio-economic exploitation per se. W hat the Black Jacobins, mistakenly, admired in their French brethren, the lower-class sans-culottes and the peasants, was that, post-revolution, they seemed to “now [be] enjoying the fruits of the earth.” Their implicit call to end exploited labor and the alienation of the produc ers from the products of their labor by killing their masters went consider ably beyond any form of bourgeois and republican radicalism. While the Black Jacobins conceived of slavery as the most exploitative form of labor, their call to enjoy the fruits of their labor was clearly a wider socio-revolutionary one, which has a long tradition throughout Europe. This exhortation to end aliénât- ed labor moves considerably beyond Jacobin ideology and instead locates the Black Jacobins within a proto-communist trajectory. 17 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The M aking o f the Black Radical Tradition (London; Totowa, N.J.: Zed; Biblio Distribution Center, 1983), 386. In the Anglophone context, the religiously-connoted phrase of enjoying the fruits of one’s labor first came to prominence during the English Revolution, propagated by radical sects, such as the Diggers, who communally occupied and farmed common land. For example, in 1649 Robert Evered declared in court that “God would bring his people out of this slavery, and restore them to their freedom in enjoying the fruits and benefits of the Earth. ”18 At the time of the American Revolution, the British agrarian socialist Thomas Spence used this metaphor, too, as he indicted the exploiters of the laboring poor in his 1775 Newcastle lecture on the Rights of Man. In Britain, Spence maintained, it appeared as if the rich “had been created for the sole purpose of destroying the fruits of the earth.”19 In The Rights o f Infants (1796) he demanded that the rights of man must transcend the political sphere, and called instead for “rights [to] extend to a full participation of the fruits of the earth.”20 In the same year, during the French Revolution, the early socialist François Noël Babeuf and his conspirators phrased in similar terms their critique against the exploitative mode of production for their campaign against private property. In the festo of the Equals (1796) they demanded “the common enjoyment of the fruits of the land: the fruits belong to all.”21 As this snapshot of the phrase ‘fruits of the earth’ in the European radical and early socialist tradition demonstrates, James deliberately placed his slave revolutionaries into a transatlantic, ultra-radical trajectory, far left of bour geois republicanism. For James, the Haitian revolutionaries are as much Black Jacobins as Black Early Communists. While they employ the slogans of the 18 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Common- ersy a n d the Hidden History o f the Revolutionary A tla n tic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 118. Linebaugh and Rediker assert that C.L.R. James was among “the students” of the 1647/48 ‘Putney Debates,’which included similarly radical socio-revolutionary demands voiced by the ‘Levellers’ among the soldiers (ibid., 108). 19 Thomas Spence, The Rights o f M an, as Exhibited in a Lecture, Read a t the Philosophical Society, in Newcastle, to Which Is Now First Added, an Interesting Conversation, between a Gentleman a n d the Author, ... With the Queries Sent by the Rev. Mr. J. Murray, to the Society ... A n d a Song o f Triumph fo r the People, on the Recovery o f Their Long Lost Rights. The Fourth Edition. By T. Spence (London: printed for the author, 1793) 33. 20 Thomas Spence, The Rights o f Infants; or, the Imprescriptible Right o f Mothers to Such a Share o f the Elements as Is Sufficient to Enable Them to Suckle and Bring up Their Young in a Dialogue between the Aristocracy a n d a Mother o f Children. To Which Are Added, by Way o f Preface and Appendix, Strictures on Paines Agrarian Justice. By T. Spence, (London: printed for the author, 1797), 5. 21 Sylvain Maréchal, Manifesto o f the Equals. (Accessed: April 24, 2014) http://www.marx- ists.org/history/france/revolution/conspiracy-equals/1796/manifesto.htm I l lu s t ra t io n 1.1 Nouvelles cartes de la Republique française. A n advertisement for French Revolutionary Playing Cards (Paris: U. Jaume et JD. Dugourc, 1 7 9 3 -9 4 ) (details). © b ib lio th èq u e n ationale de france the grace of the French Republic. Sometimes, the images even made explicit comparisons with the sans-culottes. In an advertisement for a deck of revolu tionary playing cards, a sans-culotte sitting on boulder from the Bastille forms the Jack of Spades, while a black figure with a rifle, sitting on a sack o f coffee, forms the Jack of Diamonds (Illustration 1.1). In the advertisement, the sans-culotte is associated with “puissance” (pow- er or strength) and epitomizes the “equality of ranks.” In contrast, the Black sans culotte is associated with “courage” and epitomizes “equality of colors.” In short, together they symbolize an idealized republican vision of the equality of class and race. Problematically, the advertisement, instead of using the more neutral noir (black), refers to “le Nègre [sic],” which in French carries even more racist connotations than its English translation, which is negro. Clothed in the colors of French republican tricolore, the black sans-culotte is wearing a ban- danna, which can be read as echoing a creolized version of the sans-culottes cap of liberty. Both figures apotheosize the emancipatory power of the French Republic rather than celebrating the revolutionary self-emancipation of the Saint- Dominguean slaves. Instead, the black sans-culotte is cast, as the bottom 10 I l lu s t ra t io n 1.2 Richard Newton: A real San Culotte!! (1792). © the tru s te e s o f th e b ritish museum right corner of the image suggests, in the role of a foot soldier of the French Revolution protecting French colonial commodities such as coffee. In British contemporary visual culture, however, such a — however compro mised - shift in the trope of Black Jacobins away from the horror image did not occur. The contemporary image that encapsulates British anxiety about the transatlantic revolutionary threat posed by the Black Jacobins perhaps most strikingly is the caricature “A Real San Culotte!!” (1792) (Illustration 1.2). Unlike the French cards, in this caricature the Black and the White sans culottes are merged into one figure. The print is the work of Richard Newton, a fifteen-year old engraver working for the London publisher William Holland. However, this print was published under Newton’s name rather than Holland’s i i in December 1792, the month Holland was arrested for publishing Thomas Paine’s banned defense of the Rights o f Man (1791-92). As the title of the car icature suggests, the figure depicted was no bourgeois Jacobin, but rather a decidedly lower-class sans-culotte\ It is striking how the artist employs the image’s central visual device, the split figure: the left half consists of a ruddy and lusty lower-class French revo lutionary, a sans-culotte, while the right half is made up of a devilish African ized warrior figure. The sans-culottés foot is placed on “France,” which seems to have been reddened by revolutionary bloodshed.26 At closer inspection we discover the lower end of the figure’s stockings and the sole of his shoe even seem to have been stained with the blood that he and the other sans-culottes have shed. He is wearing a cloth belt from which a blunderbuss, a smaller fire arm, shears and scissors are protruding. The point of the scissors is obviously a phallic symbol that points towards the devil’s tail attached to the right half of the split figure. On his belt, the sans-culotte is wearing a pouch which seems to be made out of the same bluish, black scaly skin that characterizes the figure on the figure’s other half. He sports a cap of liberty on his head with a révolu- tionary cockade attached and holds a dagger in his hands from which blood is dripping: drops threaten to fall onto “England.” His liberty cap is joined at the top with the horns of the monstrous figure on the right, which displays typical attributes of the devil. Its cloven hoof is firmly placed on “America” and he spits fumes as well as little snakes. His devil’s tail disappears into the Atlantic and re-emerges off the coast of England, with its pointed tip wiggling around the English soil. As well as being a devil, he is also characterized as a person of African descent through various clichéd accoutre ments: he holds a spear as a weapon, wears an Africanized garb, and carries a fetish or medicine pouch around his neck. Even his dress mirrors his ambigu ous status, vacillating between devil and black rebel. If you look very closely at his Africanized dress, the pattern appears to consist of little images of flies, which could refer to his satanic status as the biblical Lord of the Flies, or Beel- zebub. This ambiguity even extends to his skin. With its scaly, reptilian quality, it evokes a devil’s skin, while its bluish-black color points to a person of African descent. As Marcus Wood points out, Newton used the same bluish-black tone to depict both satanic and black figures in his other works.27 26 I am thankful to Miranthi Huwae for pointing out the significance of the color scheme of countries or continents in the print. 27 Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations o f Slavery in England a n d Am erica (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 158. 12 I l lu s t r a t io n 1.3 Isaac Cruikshank: A Right Honourable Alias A Sans Culotte (1792). © th e tru s te e s o f the b r itish museum French lower-class revolutionaries. It implies that these white figures carry the black satanic revolutionaries in them, thus quasi-equating French and Fiaitian revolutionaries within the moral hierarchy of W hite classist and racist ideology. Newton leaves little doubt that the devilish figure on the right constitutes indeed a caricature of a Saint-Domingue’s slave revolutionary. By placing his hoof firmly on America, Newton stresses that this is a caricature of a figure from the African diaspora, more precisely a slave. The pun in the title San Culotte, with the missing V in Sans, might further be an allusion to San (to) Domingo, the English colonial name for Haiti. Some interpreters have stressed the alleged ambiguity of the image, and consequently claimed that it might constitute “an ironic comment on fears of Revolution” or an unwillingly 15 executed, commissioned “anti-French print”.32 The British Museum catalogue description states even more bluntly: “Satire on the fears of Revolution.” Such conjectures are inadequate, precisely because they completely ignore the eth- nie identity of the devilish figure of the slave rebel. I cannot detect any sign of irony in this print that would counter the demonization of the sans-culotte, let alone the slave rebel. In fact, the lack of irony becomes even more appar- ent if we situate the print within Newton’s oeuvre: Newton strongly warns of the spread of slave revolts throughout the British West Indies in another car- icature, “The Blind Enthusiast,” also from the year 1792, in which he mocks the British abolitionist MP William Wilberforce. In this image, Newton’s satire is mostly directed against the abolitionists and the slaves, not the slavehold- ers. In a third print, in the viciously racist caricature “Cruelty and Oppression Abroad” (1792), Newton attempts to debunk accounts of the horrors of slavery circulated by abolitionists. In this image, Newton insists that the abolitionists’ accounts are propagandistic fabrications, while in reality the happily dancing ‘Negro’ slaves lead a charmed life. Even when Newton seems to criticize the ex cesses’ of slavery, as in “A Forcible Appeal for the Abolition of the Slave Trade” (1792), it is the black slave drivers with their caricatured evil looks whipping the slaves who are the real villains of the piece and not the white slave owners. As these examples show, it is extremely unlikely that Newton meant “A Real San Culotte!!’’ ironically, since all depictions of black people in his prints are strongly and viciously racist. Newton might demonstrate a tinge more sympa- thy towards the French sans-culotte in his prints, but, as has been pointed out, the logic of the split figure strongly counters this. What Marcus Wood observes with reference to Edmund Burke’s conflation of white and black Jacobinism equally applies to Newton and his print “A Real San Culotte!!:” “he operates a satiric miscegenation in which the black Jacobins are the demonic extension of white Jacobinism, the revolutionary devil you don’t know engendered by the one you do.”33 What “A Real San Culotte!!” most forcefully expresses — beyond any ambigu- ity — is the deep-seated fear of a twin specter of transatlantic revolution. The threat posed to Britain from the lusty sans-culottes is obvious, since the blood on his dagger is about to drop on British soil and will eventually drench England in blood as well. However, the Saint-Domingue rebel is also threatening Britain and its colonial empire with his devilish serpent tail. America still appears as 32 David Alexander, Richard Newton a n d English Caricature in the 1790s (Manchester: The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester University Press, 1998), 118. 33 Marcus Wood, Slavery, E m pathy a n d Pornography, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 16 2002), 157 green as England, thus it is, in spite of the earlier American Revolution, yet untainted by the revolutionary bloodshed that has engulfed and reddened the map of revolutionary France. While the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue obviously challenged the slave regimes of the Americas, these events even threatened the British mainland, as the caricature suggests. The devil’s tail dis appears in the Atlantic (its submerged shape is faintly, barely visibly, traced in pencil), resurfacing off the coast of Britain and wiggling over its soil with its tip pointing towards London. “A Real San Culotte!!” evokes a transatlantic specter of revolution in which the French sans-culotte and the Black sans-culotte, the Saint- Domingue slave rebel, merge into one figure of transatlantic revolution- ary menace. Together, they threaten the transatlantic status quo: the British monarchy and its regime on the eastern side of the Atlantic, and colonialism and slavery, the mainstays of the transatlantic economy, on the western side of the ocean. 3 Edmund Burke’s Counterrevolutionary Invectives against the Black Jacobins in Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796) and James Gillray’s caricature “Promised Horrors o f a French Invasion” (1796) The anti-revolutionary trope of the Black Jacobins was not limited to visual culture. Most notorious in the British context are arguably Edmund Burkes vitriolic attacks on the Saint-Domingue rebels. In his infamous diatribe against the fledgling French Revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke had already prophesied that the French Revolution would lead to anti-colonial revolutions by the colonists. This in turn would trigger a slave revolution: “As the colonists rise on you, the negroes rise on them. Troops again—Massacre, torture, hanging! These are your rights of men!”34 By implying that the Rights of Man would lead to the revolutionary over throw of colonialism and slavery, Burke here emphasized the explosive power that lay in their universalist interpretation. More astutely than many of the contemporary revolutionaries, the staunch counterrevolutionary Burke recog nized that the doctrine of the Rights of the Man had the potential to function as one of the ideological triggers for slave revolution. In revolting, the slaves claimed these rights for themselves, which were never intended to apply to them. While Burke deeply detested any form ofpopular revolution, either by slaves or by the European masses, in his ominous warning of colonial and slave revolution he ironically came very close to James’ assertion the slaves caught “the spirit of thing” in their revolution: a universalist interpretation of the “Rights of Man” beyond its class and race limitations. 34 Edmund Burke, Select Works o f Edmund Burke, E. J. Payne & F. Canavan, eds., vol. 2 (India napolis: Liberty Fund, 1999 17 Gillray was evidently aware of the controversy between Thelwall and Burke, as both feature prominently in his print. Using his “Lectures” as a whip, Thelwall is driving the radical oxen (a symbol for Burke’s arch-enemy, the Duke of Bedford) through the streets of a burning London, which is in the grip of the French revolutionary invasion. Burke is being kicked off a balcony and is about to be impaled on the horns of the radical ox. Falling with him is a pamphlet entitled Reflections upon a Regicide Peace, a confia- tion of Burke’s Reflection on the Revolution in France and his Letters on a Reg- icide Peace. In an intertextual/intervisual circle, Gillray s print could in itself even be said to form an illustration of Burke’s “Gillrayesque leap of the imag- ination ”40 — a horrific scenario of England after the feared French invasion, which Burke so colorfully conjures up in his Letters on a Regicide Peace. Both Burke’s texts and Gillray’s print, which shows the “desolated” city of London swarming with Burke’s dreaded revolutionary savages include bloodthirsty tribunals, consisting this time not of Black but French Jacobins as judges: the law totally, fundamentally, and in all its parts destroyed; the judges put to death by revolutionary tribunals; the Peers and Commons robbed to the last acre of their estates; [...] the desolated cities, the wasted fields, and the rivers polluted with blood [...].41 Again, Black and White Jacobins are closely linked. Burke’s apocalyptic sce nario of revolutionary carnage and anarchy inflicted upon the British estab lishment by French invaders ends with the aforementioned indictment of the Black Jacobins as murderers of the English upper classes in Saint-Domingue. These were condemned to death by criminal and murderous “tribunals formed of Maroon negro slaves, covered over with the blood of their masters.”42 However, it was not just Burke who conjured up the horror of the Black Jaco bins, which he merged with that of the White Jacobins. I would argue that Gillray was an astute reader of Burke and, as such, he not only integrated revolutionary tribunals, but also Black Jacobins into his print. If you look closely, a number of the soldiers of the French army are caricatured with simian facial features. In particular, the goose-stepping officer (stepping over a severed head) bears fea tures that were used in contemporary racist caricatures to depict black people, such as a broad, flat nose and thick, bulging lips. This racial slur becomes all the more poignant if one considers that in the French Revolutionary army (unlike 40 Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy a n d Pornography, 157. 41 Edmund Burke, Select Works Vol. 3, 142. 42 Ibi 20 in the British) some mixed-race soldiers rose to high ranks. Not only was the renowned swordsman, abolitionist and composer Chevalier de Saint-Georges the commander of a short-lived all-Black legion named after him — Légion de St.- Georges — but also his second-in-command Alexandre Dumas, father of the eponymous famous novelist, rose to one of the highest ranks in the French Army, becoming division general of several armies. It is not at all improbable that Dumas would have commanded a French army sent towards England, as he had commanded several French military campaigns. While this close rival of Napoleon was an extremely prominent figure during his own time, he and other mixed-race participants of the French Revolution have virtually been written out of the official history of the French Revolution.431 believe that, giv- en the prominence of these two mixed-race officers, there can be very little doubt that Gillray refers to these and other Black Jacobins in the French army, even more so since the commander in the caricature is wearing a uniform in the colors of the Légion des St. Georges, red and green.44 Since he seems to be commander of the French invading army, this figure might very well represent a caricature of General Alexandre Dumas, who originally hailed from Saint- Domingue and was the son of a noble plantation owner and one of his slaves. As in the works of Burke and Newton, in Gillray’s caricature the Black Jacobins also form the ultimate Gothic trope of revolutionary terror. They are marching through the blood-soaked streets of a ransacked and pillaged London, whose establishment- figures they either guillotine or lynch. As with Burke, white and black Jacobins alike become the ultimate horror tropes of revolutionary terror. As is implied in both, if Jacobinism were to take over Britain, the consequence would be nothing short of a secular apocalypse, a complete meltdown of all po- litical and social order. Similarly to Newton, Burke and Gillray also merge White and Black Jacobins, the European and African ‘savages,’ into one looming figure of transatlantic revolutionary menace. This combined figure threatens to an- nihilate the British Empire from its class system to its economic base, which consisted in colonial slavery and the triangular trade, including the slave trade. However, there might be even the warning about a potentially destabilizing effect of the continuing slave trade, when the tortures of the plantation slave regime are evoked in the depiction of Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, half-stripped being whipped at a Liberty tree by the aforementioned MP Charles James Fox. In a 1791 caricature, “Barbarities in the West-Indies,” Gill- ray had attacked the excessive cruelty of some planters by depicting a planter 43 Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal a n d the Real Count o f M onte Cristo (London: Vintage Books, 2013). 44 I am grateful to Lubaina Himid for pointing out the significance of these uniform colors. 21 throwing a slave into a vat of boiling sugar syrup. Yet again, Fox, painted with a dark skin color and frizzy hair, might just constitute another sans-culotte figure closely related to the Black Jacobins or Black sans-culottes. In fact, Gilray in another related caricature, “Consequences of a Successful Invasion” (1798) depicts the French Jacobins establishing a regime of plantation slavery in En gland complete with whips and French slave drivers, with one explicitly lik ened to a “negro driver” who whips the “English slaves.” For Gilray it seems, tapping into the trope of the Black Jacobins serves to further fan hysteria of a French invasion and a revolution in England, which he depicts as a monstrous enslavement of the freeborn’ Englishmen, including the peasantry. 4 “The Fate o f St. Domingo Awaits You”: Robert Wedderburn and his Vision o f Transatlantic Proto-Proletarian Revolution The mixed-race, ultra-radical abolitionist and revolutionary preacher Robert Wedderburn (1762-1835/6?) recognized more clearly and indicted more angrily than any other early-nineteenth-century British commentator the interactions between race and class oppression and exploitation that propped up the British Empire. Wedderburn constituted a key player in the London ultra-radical under ground, particularly during the 1810s.45 As a radical abolitionist,46 however, he should also be considered a pivotal figure of the Black Atlantic.47 I would argue that he also played a key role in the development of the trope of Black Jacobinism, for not only did he understand the intersectionality between race and class op- pression (if not gender), he was also one of the first in Britain to embrace the so- cio- revolutionary violence of Black Jacobinism. This placed him in sharp contrast to earlier British radicals, such as John Thellwall, who displayed great sympathies for the Black Jacobins, but ultimately did not condone revolutionary violence, be it by the White or Black Jacobins.48 Conversely, some radicals even demonized the slave revolutionaries, contrasting them with the oppressed peace-loving British 45 Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in Lon- don, 1795-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 46 Iain McCalman, “Antislavery and Ultra-Radicalism in Nineteenth Century England: The Case of Robert Wedderburn,” Slavery & Abolition, 7.2 (1986): 99-117. 47 Michael Morris. Scotland a n d the Caribbean, C. 1740-1833: Atlantic Archipelagos (New York: Routledge, 2015), 174-186; Alan J. Rice “Ghostly and Vernacular Presences in the Black Atlantic” in E.T. Bannet and S. Manning, eds., Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660— 1 8 3 0 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 154-168, here 161-166. 48 Raphael Hörmann, “Thinking the ‘Unthinkable ?” 158-164. 22 44 Hörmann the Old Testament, in particular its insistence on retributive justice, to lend force to his revolutioniDerfde&^h(^olQl^fihe bytj^d^h^nfg? hegemonic Gothic, which had been used on numerous occasions to demonize the Black Jacobins for his own revolutionary ends, turning it into — what I have termed — the “Haitian radical Gothic.”55 While the Gothic iconography of the slave revolt which Wedderburn referenced here was a common stereotype in pro-slavery writing in general, he might have been intertextually referring to a specific pas- sage from Bryan Edwards’ Historical Survey o f the French Colony in the Island o f St. Domingo (1797),56 which describes the onset of the Haitian Revolution. It was quoted in most British publications on the Haitian Revolution up until at least the mid-nineteenth century and tapped into the Gothic iconography of the slave revolt with the black ‘monsters’ murdering the ‘innocent,’ the women and children: Upwards of one hundred thousand of savage people, habituated to the bar barities of Africa, avail themselves of the silence and obscurity of the night, and fall on the peaceful and unsuspicious planters, like so many famished tygers thirsting for human blood. Revolt, conflagration, massacre, every where mark their progress; and death in all its horrors, or cruelties and outrages, compared to which immediate death is mercy, await [sic] alike the old and the young, the matron, the virgin and the helpless infant.57 Edwards’ Black Jacobins were both animalized and quasi-vampiric figures: “tygers thirsting for human blood.” These semi-savages, semi-animals, semi vampires butchered not just those immediately responsible for slavery but their families as well. As most slave rebels agreed, the entire planter class in any colony had to be eradicated if their revolt would stand any chance of sue- cess. This slaughter of the innocent that Edwards decries, however, also consti- tuted a vital part of the pro-slavery iconography of slave revolts. Wedderburn forcefully countered this demonization of the slave revolution aries. His Black Jacobins were rational, smart guerrilla freedom fighters like the Haitian revolutionaries and maroons, “who will not stand to engage organised troops, like those silly Irish rebels” of 1798 and 180358; a warning addressed as 55 SeeHoermann, “AVery Hell ofHorrors.” 56 Bryan Edwards, A n Historical Survey o f the French Colony in the Island o f St. D om ingo (London: John Stockdale, 1797). 57 Ibid., 63. 58 Robert Wedderburn, Horrors o f Slavery, 86. 25 44 Hörmann much to the Jamaican slaves as to the London’s ultra-radicals. The slaves’ kill ing of the innocent’ may have been a weapon of revolutionary terror, but it also stemmed from the insight that to overcome the terror system of slavery, it might prove necessary to kill all who are implicated, irrespective of age and sex: “man, woman, and child, and not spare the virgin, whose interest is connected with slav ery.” Wedderburn seemed to suggest that within the slave system, any insistence on innocence becomes spurious. Furthermore, he insisted that overthrowing the horrors of slavery required revolutionary terror, as he rhetorically appropriated the hegemonic Haitian Gothic and turned it into the radical Haitian Gothic, which used tropes of terror to indict the plantation slave regime/economy and to extol the achievements of the Haitian Revolution in overthrowing it. Moreover — and here Wedderburn was again distinctly modern — he did not see slavery as a purely racial system of exploitation and domination. Irrespec- tive of race, irrespective of whether they were “black, white or tawny,” anyone implicated in this system of terror and exploitation was equally guilty. Wedder burn had his finger on the dialectics of race and class in the colonial situation, which C.L.R. James would later formulate in this decidedly Marxian chiasmus in Black Jacobins: The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the ra cial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.59 Wedderburn understood — like James — that class domination and exploitation underpinned the socio-economic systems of racial domination of slavery and/ or colonialism. This seems to be at heart of Wedderburn’s appropriation of the trope of the Black Jacobin just as it would be for James. At the same time, both acknowledged the racial oppression involved in the system as well. This out look enabled Wedderburn to agitate for a double transatlantic revolution of the European proto-proletarians and the proto-proletarian slaves in the Carib bean. Even when Wedderburn, the son of a slave, envisaged the revolutionary “Slaughter for their Liberty in England,” he couched it in the rhetoric of slave revolution: “Death was as acceptable as Slavery, and if he was to die for his Lib- erty it would rouse those he left behind him to kill their masters to gain their liberty,” as a spy reports him preaching.60 59 C.L.R. James, Black Jacobins, 230. 60 Robert Wedderburn, Horrors o f Slavery 114. 26 46 Hörmann ares’ kill- e same Alth mue.. capitalist socio-economic exploitation, ne meant cftattei slavery time. Wedderburn thus developed an understanding very close to James’ Black Jacobins of the double social revolution of the White sans-culottes who, having “killed their masters” were “enjoying the fruits of the earth,” and the Black sans-culottes following their (misunderstood) example. In a socio-revolutionary manner, Wedderburn equally demanded that liberty must be coupled with com munal land ownership, “possession of the soil”61 because “without that freedom is not worth possessing.”62 In a certain way, Wedderburn was even more radical than James, as he insisted that the revolutionary slaves, not the French , must form the transatlantic vanguard, and constituted a revolutionary inspiration to — what he considered — the timid English working classes. Significantly, no- where did he even mention the French Revolution. Instead, according to a Home Office spy report, Wedderburn “said they [the slaves] fought in some instances for twenty years for Liberty’ — and then appealed to the Britons who boasted such superior feelings and principles, whether they were ready to fight now but for a short time for their Liberties.”63 Without completely conflating Black and White Jacobins, Wedderburn insisted that only their trans-racial alliance and a thus en- suing social revolution could overthrow the interrelated transatlantic systems of repression and exploitation, slavery and early capitalism. His simultaneous ap- peals to the English laborers and the Caribbean slaves were more than a rhetorical distraction from his seditious calls for insurrection in England. Wedderburn envisioned the merger of Black and White Jacobins (or, may- be more accurately, revolutionary slaves and English proto-proletarians) in a most remarkable, poignant form in his concluding remarks to the debate on the question “has a Slave an inherent right to slay his master who refuses him his Liberty?”64 When Wedderburn eventually affirms this right, he means both the “Slaves” in the British “Cotton Factories”65 and the slaves in the West In- dies. Speaking both as the son of a slave and as the ultra-radical preacher and impoverished London tailor, “Mr W. then exclaimed, well Gentlemen, I can now write home and tell the Slaves to murder their Masters as soon as they 61 Ibid., 106. 62 For a discussion of how far Wedderburn’s revolutionary land plan follows the land plan of the early communist Thomas Spence and his followers, see Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker, The Many'Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, a n d the Hidden History o f the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 287-326. 63 Ibid., 116. 64 Ibid., 113. 65 Ibid., 114. 27 50 Hörmann Fick, Carolyn E. The Making o f Haiti. The Saint Domingue Revolution From Below. Knox ville: The University ofTennessee Press, 1990. Gaspar, David Barry Geggus David Patrick. A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution a n d the Greater Caribbean. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Geggus, David Patrick, ed. 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