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Foreword
The Black lacobins was first published in England in 1938, but I
had written on the subject before I left Trinidad in 1932. I had
had the idea for some time . I was tired of reading and hearing
about Africans being persecuted and oppressed in Africa, in the
Middle Passage, in the USA and all over th~<:;:aribbe'l.n. I made
up ' my mind that I would write a book in which Africans or
people of African descent instead of constantly being the object
1 of other peoples' eXRloitation and ferOCIty would themselVeSbe
taKing act!on on a grand scale and shaping other people to their
awn neeas jrlle books on the HaItian revolution that I hadr ead
L were of no serious historical value, so as soon as I arrived int
England i11T932, I began to look for materials and found only
the same shallow ones I had read in the Cari'o-15ean. r -t m­
mediately b'egan -to rlffiport books f~om France which dealt
seriously with this memorable event in French history .
The book is dedicated to Harry and Elizabeth Spencer. Harry
ran a teashop and bakery and was a great friend of mine. He was
a cultivated man and I used to talk to him about my writing
J
plans . Whenever a bQoks;ame frolJl _France and I saw something
..exciting in it, I would report enthusiastically to him. One day he
~ 'D-,\.
,- said to me, "Why are you always talking about this book-whY'
qon't you write it?" J told him that I had to go fOFrance to theJ
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L archives, I didn't have the mone~ s yet but I was saving. He

asked me how much money lwOUld need and G old him about a ':Ie . l~" J
hundred pounds tostarL wjtl:!. He left it there but a few days
afterwards put ninety pounds in my hands and said, "On to
France, and if you need more, let me know." As soon as the
summer season was :over (1 was a cricket reporter), off I went
and spent six months in France covering ground at a tremendous
rate.
I met in Paris Colonel Nemours, a Haitian who had written a
military history of the war of independence in San Domingo.
Nemours was very ,happy to find someone, and that person a
" ,11 Caribbean, who wa~ interested in the history of HaUi. He ex­
plained the whole thing to me in great detail, using books and

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 vi FOREWORD

coffee cups upon a large table to show how the different

(\ ' v~
campaigns had been fought. To this day 1 am convinced that,
~part from Napoleon himself, no military commanders or J
l
st~g~sts of 1793-1815 exceeded- ToU,ssamt eOuverture and
v
Dessalmes.
r I -::;, In England 1 had been studying marxism and had written a
.Jli\..
(I l>\\..:-"'. history of the Communist 1I1ternational which involved a fairly
.1' Jv~,j ~\ .} ,,,'-1 close study of the Russian .r.e.xQrntign. In France, I read with
- ,,).L [l.<"'\ ~ (,
profit and excitement writers like Jean Jaures, Mathieu and,
v~y~~ above all, Michelet. I was therefore specially_p.J~Rar~d_to write
.. ' '" \ ,/(,
The Black Jacobins, not the least of my qualifications being the
fact that I had spent mo'st of my life in a West Indian island not,
in fact, too unlike the territory ofHaiti. At the same time, 1 was
working closely with George Padmore and his black
organization which was centred in London. As will be seen all
over and particularly in its last three pages, the book was written
not with the Caribbean,butWlth Africa in mma . One great virtue
anhenOok is that it is solidly based upon t~upheaval that was
taking place in the world between 1789 and 1815. In addition,
my West Indian experiences and my study of marxism had made
mesee-\Vh-athaa-efuaed -ITlany £.fe;,ious writers, that it was the II f-w.-tc.
Je ~. f r:,' \ (J~ ~'r ~aves who had made the revolutioit)Many of the slave leaders~ .
• '...I~ I { to the end were unable to read or write and in the .§lrchives.. you \ S~,'\..O...
,~. \)

l
)\ \~~ ';.1"'" ' \ I' ,l ~an_s~e reports (ana aamifable reports they are) in which the ' . t,-,
... eHicer who made it traces his name in ink over a pencil draft-' ,~,.< f
\Iv' t
-JI~ } preparedlor hIm. d· ;\
- 1938 is a long1fme ago, however, and I waited many years for
\ other people to ente~ the_lists and go further than_l was able t~r,~J,

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go. I was never worried about what they would find, confident UJ) l \
that my foundation would remain imperishable. Fouchard, a ~ ,~ \ I,J
HaItian hlstonan, has recently published a work which ~.~ 'r ' •
') '."­ ,:
\
/ establishes that it was not so much the slaves but the maroons, ' ~ ...
~"..\.",~
/ t ose who had run a ay and made a life tor themselves in the \' '~(
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~ A C 'i rY.J,lJ0 '-.,
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0: mountains forests, who ~~d led t~e ~vo~ution~n~eat~d
'---'" r', ~, / the foundatIon of the HaItIan natIon. Hltnerto, I and th
,r .! l / Rer~~wffh wnom I was politic al1yassociated had laid gf~
J <:€IDphasl~ on the fact that the slayes, gathered in hundreds at a
v time-irf1he sugar factories of the north plain, had owed mucfiOf
Their success to the fact t~t..Q!ey'_had beenClisciplined, l\nited­
'/;,<u t>J1 \ ,'"
7\~~{r~
~arfd-organized-byrlhe veryIileChanism of factory-proOuction. A:
"...,....\( _7 rl", ~,.;. 1

,\.)O -'t.. Canadian student working on a thesis on the'Black masses in the

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" Haitian revolution demonstrated that in-t1re"pr minantly rural
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!.l t ;)(~ • \ ~ area of Southern Haiti, the slaves, undiscipline y capIta ist
produchon, naa gathered on a mountairdrtfl1eirsearcnfor
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 FOREWORD vi i 'Jci
independence and, persuaded to come back to the plantation,

" .ra:rgu:sa- l1ke any worker~ in advanced c:.o u.ntric:.s to~ay-:- 'Tfiey

;.wanted to have t!free days off from work or two and a half days

or at least two days. So now we see that in the Car ibbean the ­ .Q. "'---1'

s laves' in revolTIti6~ as well asuiba.Ii) acted automatically

as if they were in the second half of the twentieth century. It is
r;' .....

obvious to me today, as I saw in 1938, t~at further..Jjtudy of the

(l..u"t~~ '-' " ''-- f'.-.:<>j'l.»­ '(k-.. ~_Il(

revolution in French San Domingo will reveal more and more of

its affinity with revolutions in more developed commun'!.!it~~

ie s,-
.
__
Let me end this foreword with one of the most remarkable (~ -, t J
'1( .{ . / : \
experiences of The Black Jacobins. During the celebrations of

the independence of Ghana in 1957, I met some Pan-African J VI

young men from South Africa who told me that my book had tv'" '
been of great service to them. ,I wondered how and t hey ex­

plaineo tOme-: A~copy of it w'as in the library of the Black

university in South A-fric;a, though they didn ' t know anything

about it until a white professor there told them : "1 suggest that

you read The Black lacobins in the library ; you may find it

useJul.'':' Eagerly ; they got the book , read it and founa- ira \'\,c::::'"
revelation; particularly in the .relation between the blacks and VJ
v~* ,( "7 (.
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3"((
£,
the mulattos. TPtar re'la:rion tl1ey foffi1d--veryimportant for '
{"y
, <. ~,j.A.. ~ r.s. .. ·r
understanding the relation between the Black South Africans

and the Coloureds who are people of mixed race, black and

d <. <­
white. They typed out copies, mimeographed them andc ir­ l.,.,? { I ')
culated the passages from The Black lac;:,obil1s..1leaILng....with.1he

relations betweeIi)the blacks and the mixed in Haiti. I could not '0

help thinking .t ha. t re.VOlution m~es in a - mysterious way its r

wonders to perform. -7 "', \, \ L\Vz~ '" I
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---\/ .\ l ~~. C.L.R . JAMES ._~J.

S~ \" J~ r cc~W ~___

c Janua,y 1980
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