Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The “Mulatto/a” Vengeance of ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Part One From “Monstrous Hybridity” to Enlightenment Literacy
- Part Two Transgressing the Trope of the “Tropical Temptress”: Representation and Resistance in Colonial Saint-Domingue
- Part Three The Trope of the Tragic “Mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution
- Chapter Seven “Black” Son, “White” Father: The Tragic “Mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour's ‘Le Mulâtre’
- Chapter Eight Between the Family and the Nation: Lamartine, Toussaint Louverture, and the “Interracial” Family Romance of the Haitian Revolution
- Chapter Nine A ‘Quarrel Between Two Brothers’: Eméric Bergeaud's Ideal History of the Haitian Revolution
- Part Four Requiem for the “Colored Historian”; or the ‘Mulatto Legend of History’
- Coda: Today's ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter Nine - A ‘Quarrel Between Two Brothers’: Eméric Bergeaud's Ideal History of the Haitian Revolution
from Part Three - The Trope of the Tragic “Mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The “Mulatto/a” Vengeance of ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Part One From “Monstrous Hybridity” to Enlightenment Literacy
- Part Two Transgressing the Trope of the “Tropical Temptress”: Representation and Resistance in Colonial Saint-Domingue
- Part Three The Trope of the Tragic “Mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution
- Chapter Seven “Black” Son, “White” Father: The Tragic “Mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour's ‘Le Mulâtre’
- Chapter Eight Between the Family and the Nation: Lamartine, Toussaint Louverture, and the “Interracial” Family Romance of the Haitian Revolution
- Chapter Nine A ‘Quarrel Between Two Brothers’: Eméric Bergeaud's Ideal History of the Haitian Revolution
- Part Four Requiem for the “Colored Historian”; or the ‘Mulatto Legend of History’
- Coda: Today's ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘[T]he mulatto general Rigaud arrived at Philadelphia from France on the 7th … attention is anxiously drawn towards him, by a report that he was lately in this state … It is not for the sake of persecuting an individual that we introduce this article, but the safety of this and the southern states imperiously requires that he should be expelled, if he has really entered them, and that at any rate his motions should be closely watched.’
—‘Look Sharp!’ Federal Republican & Commercial Gazette, March 28, 1810‘What are all these comforts and splendors compared with the rescue of my country, and the redemption of an oppressed race? What is my life, compared with the life of this Republic? Say, dearest, that you will give me willingly to this righteous cause.’
—Lydia Maria Child, A Romance of the Republic (1867)‘The revolution, like Saturn, devoured its own children.’
—William Wells Brown, The Black Man, his Antecedents and his Genius (1863)If historical, editorial, and biographical racializations of the life of Louverture by writers like Lacroix and Métral influenced Alphonse de Lamartine in his portrayal of the downfall of the revolutionary hero as a tragic “interracial” family romance, Eméric Bergeaud's narration in Stella (1859) of the divisions between two fictional revolutionaries as a shameful ‘quarrel between brothers’ (137) was influenced by some of the same tropologies that made Louverture's struggle with his children appear Oedipal. Instead of using the “interracial” family romance and its language of patricide to describe Toussaint Louverture and his children, in Stella, Bergeaud focuses on what he paints as an unfortunate, but in the end redemptive, fratricidal conflict between two brothers with different skin colors, Romulus, whose skin color could be ‘compared to the blackest of ebony,’ and Rémus, whose skin Bergeaud said was the ‘pale shade of mahogany’ (8). Bergeaud, for his part, wrote that he had used the names of these Roman figures ‘less with the thought of establishing a one-to-one analogy between them and the historical twins, but because they were brothers’ (20).
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- Tropics of HaitiRace and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865, pp. 412 - 458Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015