Why should a study of Caribbean Critique begin by examining French Jacobinism and its defense in the political writings of Kant? My motive in this chapter is not simply to pursue the lead C. L. R. James famously proposed when he entitled his classic study of the Haitian Revolution The Black Jacobins. Determining the precise relation between these two political sequences is certainly important, but I argue that 1789, Jacobinism, and Robespierre stand as the decisive refutation of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's famous assertion that the events of the Haitian Revolution from 1791–1804 were ‘unthinkable’ (see Trouillot 1995: 82). Trouillot's claim is not simply that the Haitian political sequence remained misunderstood, if not actively stigmatized and debased, as it unfolded and in the two centuries since. To a certain extent, this empirical claim is true – but nearly two decades of intensive historiographic investigation of the Haitian Revolution since Trouillot made this assertion has begun to address this problem.

Trouillot's claim of unthinkability is a much stronger one, namely, ‘that the events that shook up Saint Domingue from 1791 to 1804 […] were “unthinkable” facts’. The unthinkable, Trouillot tells us, refers specifically to ‘that for which one has no adequate instruments to conceptualize. […] The unthinkable is that which one cannot conceive within the range of possible alternatives, that which perverts all answers because it defies the terms under which the questions were phrased’ (Trouillot 1995: 82). But, as I will argue, those ‘adequate instruments’ of thought were readily available, circulating throughout the Atlantic world and Saint-Domingue in particular in both printed matter (in colonial papers such as the Jacobin Créole Patriote) and oral debate, in the abstract, universalist, race-free axioms of the Declarations of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 and 1793, as well as the debates and proceedings of the French Revolution as reported in both French and colonial journalism and through oral communication by subaltern sailors and other travellers from Europe.

The Haitian Revolution was in no sense unthinkable as its events unfolded; I would revise Trouillot's claim to insist that there occurred a general failure to think through the simplest and most obvious implications of the universal truth that Tous les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et égaux en droits.