DAUT, Marlene - Enlightment and Color Prejudice in Dumas' Georges (2017)

Haiti and the Black Romantics: Enlightenment and Color Prejudice After the Haitian
Revolution in Alexandre Dumas's "Georges" (1843)

Author(s): MARLENE L. DAUT
Source: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 56, No. 1, Black Romanticism (SPRING 2017), pp. 73-
91
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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MARLENE L. DAUT
Haiti and the Black Romantics:
Enlightenment and Color

Prejudice After the Haitian
Revolution in Alexandre
Dumas's Georges (1843)
For
ticwell overon
fictions ioo years,
both sidesthe Haitian
of the revolution
Atlantic.1 hauntedappears
The Revolution romanin
Leonora Sansay's gothic romance Secret History, or the Horrors of St. Domingo
(1808), Heinrich von Kleist's tragic "Die Verlobung in Santo Domingo"
(1811), Victor Hugo's quasi-captivity narrative Bug-Jargal (1826), Harriet
Martineau's epic three-volume The Hour and the Man (1841), and Alphonse
de Lamartine's verse drama, Toussaint Louverture (1850). While all of these
fictional works have become relatively well-known, the contributions of
writers of African descent to a transatlantic tradition of romancing the Hai
tian Revolution has been far less acknowledged. After the Louisiana born
francophone author Victor Séjour's serialized short story, "Le Mulâtre"
(1837), and the Haitian author Émeric Bergeaud's historical romance, Stella
(1859), Alexandre Dumas's adventure novel Georges (1843) is probably the
most understudied of the black Romantic fictions of the Haitian Revolu
tion. One reason for the lack of critical attention to the relationship of
Dumas's novel to the Haitian Revolution is likely due to the fact that like
Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno" (1855), Georges can only be consid
ered an indirect representation of the Revolution.2 While both the plot
1. For a bibliography of over 200 works written on the Haitian Revolution from 1787
1900, see my website: http://www.haitianrevolutionaryfictions.com.
2. In Representations of Revolution (1789-1820) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983),
Ronald Paulson describes indirect representations of the French Revolution: "Day-to-day
actions were therefore understood in terms of analogues or fictions which related to the
shifting policies (foreign and domestic) of the government of the moment, or of different
SiR, 56 (Spring 2017)
73
74 MARLENE L. DAUT
and characters found in Georges reflect Haitian revolution

the Haitian Revolution is directly mentioned as the in
(foiled) slave revolt, the actual location of the story is not
nor Haiti. Dumas's novel, instead, tells the story of Georg
person of color living in Ile-de-France (present-day Maurit
the Napoleonic Wars (1803—1815). Georges, the son of
rich planter of color, has one older brother, Jacques, who
comes a slave-trader. Because the Muniers are free peop
like Dumas's own father had been in colonial Saint-Dom
subject to cruel treatment by a powerful family of "white"
Malmédies. The major conflict between these two families
the age of twelve Henri de Malmédie steals a flag that Pier
in a battle against the British. Pierre Munier had given th
but Henri cites the fact that he is "white" as proof that h
for himself. When Henri cuts Georges's forehead with
Georges with a scar to forever remind him of the prejudi
exhibited towards him, Georges and his brother Jacques le
France, vowing to seek revenge at a later date.
While in France, Georges embarks upon a self-enligh
that he likens to a combat with civilization, which include
can resist the temptation of women, that he is not afraid
he is immune to the addiction of gambling. When Geor
mental, physical, and intellectual "enlightenment," he
named island of Ile de Maurice (now British controlled
prove his humanity to the Malmédies. Georges soon realize
his skin color outweighs his education, good looks, and
that the same prejudices that existed there at the time of h
fourteen years earlier exist still upon his return. As a result
of his own slaves and joins forces with a runaway slave fr
plantation, Lai'za, with whom he plots a general slave rebe
to pursue his "war to the death against color prejudice.
lion ultimately fails when the slaves are tricked by the
island into drinking rum and other spirits just before the
tion.
In this article I argue that the dramatic failure of this slave rebellion in
Georges has as much to tell us about the relationship of a European metro
factions" (13). For "Benito Cereno," see Jonathan Beecher, "Echoes of Toussaint Louverture
and the Haitian Revolution in Melville's 'Benito Cereno,'" Leviathan 9, no. 2 (2007): 4.3—58.
3. Alexandre Dumas, Georges, ed. Léon-François Hofimann (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 106.
All citations from the novel are to this version, and subsequendy appear in the text by page,
and all translations are mine.
HAITIAN REVOLUTION AND DUMAS'S GEORGES 75
politan writer like Dumas to France's overseas colonies, a

about the connection between race and popular understa
tian Revolution in the nineteenth-century Atlantic Wor
of the Haitian Revolution, the trope of the "inspired mu
colonial person of color like Dumas's Georges, who has n
has been educated in France, and upon returning ho
finds that he still cannot escape color prejudice and ther
spired to revolt, not necessarily against the institution of
against the insult of color prejudice. More precisely, the
is most often a free man of color whose generational tie
are shown to outweigh his genealogical, cultural, an
the white ruling class when, despite his European and
ened" education, he becomes inspired to use slave reb
wounded pride.
The figure of the "inspired mulatto" abounds in t
print culture of the Haitian Revolution and is summ
by William Wells Brown who wrote in his 1854 speech
"St. Domingo, its revolutions and its Patriots":
[m]any of the mulattoes having received their educ

where prejudice against color was unknown, experien
isfaction at their proscription on their return to St. D
enough to make them hopeful and aspiring . . . Aware
tion of the principles of freedom that were being advo
and in the United States, they were also ever on th
opportunities to better their social and political condit
Although the Haitian revolutionary figure Vincent O

such "mulatto" inspiration for Brown,5 the term "ins
ally comes from Alfred Allinson's 1903 English tran
The translator unequivocally argued that Dumas's epo
stand-in for the author himself: "Anyhow there ca
this," Allinson writes, "the hero, Georges Munier, w
tion and discouragement because of his 'dash of the t
every obstacle and insult with irrepressible energy and sp
trait of Dumas himself, Dumas, 'the inspired mulatto.'"6
Dumas's stoic poise and grace is an allusion to the in
by Dumas in mid-nineteenth-century France made by
de Mirecourt who infamously characterized "[t]he ph
M. Dumas":
4- Brown, St. Domingo, Its Revolution and Its Patriots (1855; Boston: B. Marsh, 1977), 6.
5. See also Pierre Faubert, Ogé, ou le préjugé de couleur (Paris: C. Maillez Schmitz, 1856).
6. Allinson, trans., Georges or the Isle of France (London: Methuen & Co., 1903), iv.
76 MARLENE L. DAUT
stature of a drum major, arms like Hercules . . . prom

African nose, fuzzy hair, tan skin. His origin is written
to the other of his person; but it reveals itself much mo
character. Scratch the surface of M. Dumas and you will
He takes after the negro and the marquis all at the sa
ever, the marquis hardly goes farther than the skin . . . p
negro will show you his teeth. The marquis acts his p
the negro betrays himself in private.7
Much like many contemporary critics, Allinson attempted

own biography into the narrative of Georges by connec
about the meaning of the novelist's ancestry to the plo
mance. The literary historian Léon-François Hoffmann
vided the most ardent of these biographical readings, h
implies that "Georges can be considered at once a biogra
that illustrates the attitude of Dumas towards his 'négritud
ical document that illustrates the attitude of many mulatt
of the nineteenth century."8 Yet while Hoffmann argues t
Georges as a diatribe against the color prejudice that the au
experienced in France, I am much more interested in re
tions of Dumas's cooptation of the trope of the "inspired m
a transatlantic print culture of the Haitian Revolution. In u
lesser known tropes of the literature of the Haitian Rev
novel dramatizes the problems inherent in a nineteenth-ce
ist movement which, because it was often predicated o
"right-feeling," was unable to resolve the tensions between
of slavery and the humanitarianism of abolitionism.
The trope of the "inspired mulatto" is important for und
longue durée of the literary history of the Haitian Revolut
cause such a figure became the primary receptacle for the
the economic underpinnings of slavery and the humanitari
enlightenment thinkers and the abolitionists. Caught betw
profit from the labor of slaves as a plantation owner and h
colonial rebellion in order to avenge the rights of citizensh
7- de Mirecourt, Maison d'Alexandre Dumas et Compagnie (Paris: Chez

de Nouveauté, 1845), 7. See also, Alexandre Bonneau's 1856 descripti
Noirs, les Jaunes, et la littérature française en Haïti," Revue contemporaine
(1 December 1856): 137-38. For detailed accounts of the many different
enced by Dumas, see Eric Martone, The Black Musketeer: Reevaluating Al
the Francophone World (Newcasde: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 201
8. See HoSmann, "Dumas et les Noirs," in Georges, 22-23; Martone,
11; and Werner Sollors, Introduction, Georges, trans. Tina Kover (Ne
Library, 2007), xx-xxi.
under the colonial system, Dumas's eponymous Geo

bol of the failure of enlightenment thought and its
atlantic abolitionist movement to deal adequately w
ics of slavery or the theories of racial inferiority th
Alexandre Dumas was, in many ways, notoriously

perceived racial identity, and more specifically, abou
nection to Haiti. The handful of times that Dumas evoked his "African"
ancestry includes both an 1838 letter to the Martinican abolitionist Cyrille
Bissette, editor of the Parisian periodical, La Revue des colonies, in which
Dumas expressed his anti-slavery sympathy for his "frères de race and friends
of color,"9 and the following witty riposte to a man who had interrogated
his origins by asking him, "Well, my dear sir, you must be very well versed
in negro": "But of course," Dumas reportedly replied, "My father was a
mulatto, my grandfather was a negro, and my great-grandfather was
a monkey. You see, Monsieur, my family began where yours ended."10
Yet, as far as we know, Dumas only once spoke of his "fraternal" connec
tion to Haiti. On 5 August 1838, Dumas addressed a letter to the Haitian
government in which he wrote that he felt compelled to "erect a statue to
his father" in France. But given that General Dumas was from Saint
Domingue he wanted to be sure that he would not be preempting the Hai
tian government from doing the same. Dumas subsequently proposed a
global fiindraising effort on the part of "only the people of color, no mat
ter in what part of the world they inhabit," who could collectively raise
40,000 francs, upon receipt of which one statue would be erected in Paris
and one in Port-au-Prince.11 Dumas finished the letter by evoking a sense
of glory about not only the Haitian Revolution, but about his father's, and
therefore ostensibly a Haitian's contribution to the making of the French
nation state: "it seems to me, in any case, that it would be good for the
Haitians to teach old Europe, which is so proud of its ancient history and
its civilization, that they [the Haitians] only ceased to be French after hav
ing provided their own contribution to the glory of France."12 While Hai
tian independence is alluded to positively here, Georges presents a deeply
9- Hoffman, Georges, 477.

10. Quoted in Christian Biet et al., Alexandre Dumas ou les aventures d'un romancier (Paris:
Gallimard, 1986), 75.
11. Hoffman, Georges, 479.
12. Quoted in Hoffman, Georges, 480. At the age of thirty-one, Dumas's father, General
Alexandre Dumas, became the highest ranking person of color to have ever fought in the
French army, until Toussaint Louverture and André Rigaud. See Tom Reiss, The Black
Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (New York: Crown
Publishing, 2012), 11.
78 MARLENE L. DAUT
ambivalent point of view concerning the ultimate effectiv

revolution against slavery.
Dumas explicitly references Haiti's war of independence
ent junctures in Georges. The most overt reference occurs
a speech to the maroons and the slaves: "once upon a tim
land where all the slaves wanted to be free; together they
made it happen. This island used to be called Saint-Doming
it is called Haiti," La'iza explains, "Let's do what they d
free like them" (312). Yet in a much earlier passage in
implores his own father to become the head of such a "bla
stating, "Father . . . there they are, the Negroes, and t
leader" (61). This invitation becomes as apocryphal to t
surrection on Georges's island as the famously prophet
passage in Raynal's compilation, Histoire des deux Inde
came in the literary imagination of the Haitian Revolut
early historians like Marcus Rainsford, Toussaint Louve
to have found his destiny reflected in the following passa
"Where is he, this great man whom nature owes to her ve
and tormented children? Where is he, this new Spartacus?
In Georges, the jealous overseer of the Malmédie plant
Malais, a character of mixed-race, argues that he should b
this providential role by in essence mocking Laïza's re
Providing his own interpretation of the Caribbean isla
pendence, Antonio states, "Yes . . . yes, La'iza has spoken t
heard tell that there is, beyond Africa, far, far away, wh
big island where all the negroes are kings. But, on my ow
Laïza's island, in the kingdom of animals just as in the
there was an elected leader, but only one" (313). Antonio's
for Haiti as a model for black sovereignty reflects the
in nineteenth-century France of Haiti as a failed state. Af
Comte de Gobineau in his Essai sur l'inégalité des races hum
who would perhaps most famously explain Haiti's purporte
as the result of precisely the kind of racial contest that occ
and Antonio in the novel, and that had supposedly oc
Rigaud and Louverture in revolutionary Saint-Dom
Pétion and Christophe in independent Haiti: "The hist
democratic Haiti," Gobineau writes, "is nothing more
tion of massacres: massacres of mulattoes by negroes, whe
13- Abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique

du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, 3rd ed. 10 vols. (Genev
1780-84), 6: 206-8; Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Emp
James Cundee, 1805), 244-47.
been stronger, of negroes by mulattoes when the pow

hands of the latter."14 It is clear that Antonio thinks he s
of the revolution precisely because of his status as a per
when he states, "He who is worthy of being our leader .
has lived with whites and with blacks; the man who pos
the one and the other one; the man who, being free, wi
erty" (313)
It would be difficult to tie Dumas's allusions to the contest between
Rigaud, a former free person of color, and Louverture, a former slave, to
any particular representation of the Haitian Revolution. Yet Georges' s por
trayal of the conflict between Antonio and Laïza as racial does seem be
holden to the same nineteenth-century transatlantic print culture that
informs nearly all writing about these events, a transatlantic print culture
that, as I have elsewhere argued, is painstakingly catalyzed in the twentieth
century writing of C. L. R. James, author of The Black Jacobins (1938). Just
as Dumas's novel shows Antonio betraying the cause of the slaves by join
ing forces with the British government, James, like the vast majority of
nineteenth-century writers to whom he is indebted, tells us of Rigaud
that the "mulatto" general was "narrow-minded" and had a clear bias that
caused him to defect to the side of France and "ruin himself, his caste, and
his country for a generation."15
James's assignation of blame to General Rigaud for the civil war between
him and General Louverture, referred to by historians as the War of the
South, is largely drawn from John Relly Beard's The Life of Toussaint
L'Ouverture (1853). Beard's work is itself entirely dependent upon earlier
histories of the Revolution by writers like Pamphile de Lacroix.16 Beard
had written that after Louverture had been promoted to "general of divi
sion" in the French army, Rigaud, "the champion of the mulattoes, . . .
saw, with extreme jealousy, the black chief elevated to a rank superior to
his own."17 Like Rainsford, whose An Historical Account of the Black Empire
of Hayti is another crucial source for The Black Jacobins, James does not at
tribute Rigaud's "jealousy" of Louverture solely to his position as a "mu
latto."18 Even while reifying pseudoscientific arguments about race, to a
14- Arthur Gobineau, Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines, vol i (Paris: Librairie de Firmin
Didot Frères, 1853), 49.
15. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938;
New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 207.
16. de Lacroix, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la Révolution de Saint-Domingue, 2 vols.
(Paris: Pillet Aine, 1819).
17. Beard, The Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Negro Patriot of Haiti (London: Ingram,
Cook, and Co., 1853), 90.
18. For Rigaud's property interests, see Rainsford, An Historical Account, 30jn.
80 MARLENE L. DAUT
large extent, James writes that "[mjulatto instability lies

but in their intermediate position in society."1'' What Jam
conflict between their property and their color, then, cau
free people of color like Rigaud to be questioned in t
hour, much as Georges's own loyalties are questioned
Dumas's novel (320).
This intermediary position also makes "mulattoes," as
free people of color in general, the symbols in myriad repr
Haitian Revolution of a struggle between the anti-rac
many humanitarians and some abolitionists' ambivale
nomic ramifications of ending slavery. James points out t
tarians and philosophers" proposed giving the "mulatto
cause "mulattoes" were seen as equals, but because t
the white colonists would have "best served the interests of France" and
those of the "colonists themselves" in so far as slavery could then ostensibly
be preserved, even if later gradually eliminated. The white colonists of
Saint-Domingue could not bear to grant rights to the "mulattoes," how
ever, making the Revolution inevitable, in James's estimation, since "when
did property ever listen to reason except when cowed by violence?"20
The white colonists in Georges appear to be similarly impervious to the
idea that their property interests and that of the landed and slave owning
free people of color are actually quite the same. In the opening battle of the
Napoleonic wars over the island, the white colonists exhibit ardent preju
dices against the free people of color and do not allow them to fight in the
same battalions. Pierre Munier, in an attempt to exhibit his patriotism and
loyalty to the colonists, tries to convince them to let him fight in the colo
nial militia. He tells the elder M. de Malmédie that the only reason he has
for wanting to fight with the French is, "The desire that I have to get my
self killed, if it is necessary, to save our island" (58). M. de Malmédie re
sponds by saying, "Our island! . . . Because these people here have planta
tions like us, they imagine that the island is theirs" (58).
The attitude of the Malmédies is directly related to the reasons for which
Georges wants to lead a slave rebellion. Georges primarily seeks revenge for
the indignities that he and his father have suffered at the hands of whites.
Georges expresses his personally motivated outrage after he publicly insults
Henri and learns that the white colonists want to punish him with a whip
as if he were a "negro." Georges exclaims, "but that is the punishment
of slaves [nègres]l" (301). Georges's outburst demonstrates his shock that
a man in his position could be punished in the same way as a person of a
different—and in his mind—lesser race and class. White repudiation pro
19- James, Black Jacobins, 207.

20. James, Black Jacobins, 70.
vides the moment of crisis necessary for Georges

difference there really is between his position and th
sponse to Georges's shock about the proposed whippin
states, "Well, what are we then, we other mulattoes?
ing more" (301). Georges's own realization that "th
mous, which they had earned by their own industry
color," precipitates his solidarity with the very peop
all reality, made those "enormous fortunes" possib
Once the runaway slaves decide that Georges sh
their revolt, the narrator tells us, "only two days sep
tastrophe that would make of him another Toussaint
Pétion" (318). Of this statement, Hoffmann writes
in the struggle for the independence of Haiti, Toussa
having made the mistake of trusting Napoleon's word
a dungeon of the Jura. Alexandre Pétion, on the
claimed president of the Republic (or more exactly o
the island) in 1807."21 The novel may want us to beli
Louverture, fails at revolution because of his too "tru
of the other very real causes of Georges's failure rela
battle appears actually to be solely with color prejudic
economic system of slavery that made useful such
place. Georges not only falls into the trap of "tru
Louverture, who was tricked into boarding a shi
prison of his death, just as Georges is tricked into ap
rey's residence where he is eventually arrested, but a
an error in believing, much like Ogé, that color preju
colony's problems that needs to be eradicated.22
James faults Ogé and Louverture because in his m
knowledge that "the race question is subsidiary to
This judgment recalls one of the most important p
ography of Atlantic slavery, and one that I view
Georges. The debate centers upon the question of wh
attribute chattel slavery primarily to color prejudice
Williams argues in his famous 1944 Capitalism and Sla
sons for slavery ... are not moral, but economic . . . t
tue and vice, but to production."24 For Williams, t
just a precursor to modern capitalism, but marked th
21. Hofiman, Georges, 496.

22. See Vincent Ogé, "Motion Faite par M. Vincent Ogé, je
lons, Habitants de S.-Domingue, à l'Hôtel de Massiac, Place de
23. James, Black Jacobins, 283.
24. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University
1944), 6.
82 MARLENE L. DAUT
itself. This is because transatlantic slavery provided th

financed the Industrial Revolution in England."25 The orig
ery, in William's words, ultimately could be described as e
than racial since "[i]t had to do not with the colour of the
cheapness of the labor. "26
If slavery could be imagined to be much more about c
than institutionalizing inequality, then some early abo
thought that by proving that slave labor was actually not
labor they could combat slavery. An example of this ki
found in Maria Edgeworth's short story, "The Grateful
which her character Mr. Edwards says, "If we hired the neg
instead of purchasing them for slaves, do you think they w
well as they do now? Does any negro, under the fear of th
harder than a Birmingham journeyman, or a Newcastle co
themselves and their families?"27
Taking the opposite position, mid nineteenth-century en
U.S. often made the case that the abolition of slavery wou
ruin. One example of this ideology occurs in "Southern
wherein George Fitzhugh writes, "In the absence of ne
must be white slavery, else the white laboring class are re
to capital, which is much more cruel and exacting than dom
This idea of "white slavery" as a possible reality rather
metaphor is reflected in Jacques's belief that the slave tra
abolished because it "was harming the traffic of whites,"
was inhumane (233). Jacques's belief squares with Williams
"the importance" of abolitionists to the end of slavery
been seriously misunderstood."29 Williams believes that
abolitionists" who agitated for an end to Britain's particip
trade and later for the abolition of slavery in the British
plain about the "inhumanity of West Indian slavery," thei
to be measured against their simultaneous and paradoxi
25- Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, ix. In Specters of the Atlantic: Fin
and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), I
out that even if generations of economic historians have contested
Britain's "entire national economy" was "built on [it's] involvemen
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century merchant classes seem to have un
of Liverpool was due to Atlantic slavery (52).
26. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 19.
27. Edgeworth, "The Grateful Negro" (The University of Adelaid
2014), https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.aU/e/edgeworth/maria/grateful-n
cember 2016.
28. Fitzhugh, "Southern Thought," Dehow's Review 23 (1857): 339.
the "unprofitableness of West Indian monopoly," par

the sugar traffic in Brazil and India.30
Back in early nineteenth-century France, howe
movement was unfolding very differently from i
The France of the 1810s and 20s can be infamousl
hostility to both anti-slavery thought and the abolit
"Observations sur la constitution du nord d'Haïti"
Grégoire, perhaps France's most famous abolitioni
when he wrote that while England abounded with "f
such as, Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce,
Zachary Macaulay, he was very much alone in France
as a result of his almost singular anti-slavery activism
marily attacking the idea of color prejudice rathe
nomic implications of forced labor, "supporters of tr
have especially directed against me their persecutions
his earlier De la traite de l'esclavage des Noirs et des B
luded to the way in which the current and former co
metropolitan pro-slavery apologists, had attempted t
ize the aims of the philanthropic abolitionist move
"they even tried, without succeeding, to stigma
thropy. . . . Then, according to the language as it wa
it became routine to repeat that the principles of equ
metaphysical abstractions, or even mere ideology, be
logic and a slang that is all its own."32
The figure of the "inspired mulatto," in many way
embodiment of the tension between slavery as a capi
planters of color like Georges and his brother (an
participated, and the humanitarian goal of eradicatin
bodied by Grégoire's brand of abolitionism, from wh
of color wanted to benefit. What is painted in Dum
error of focusing upon color prejudice as a motivatio

31. Grégoire, "Observations sur la constitution du Nord d'Haït
s'est formées en France de ce gouvernement," Revue française d'
328-29 (2000): 152. Recall that Jacques Pierrot Brissot de Wa
Société des Amis des Nègres was executed during the French
32. Grégoire, De la traite de l'esclavage des Noirs et des Blancs (Par
A character in Victor Hugo's 1826 novel about the Haitian Revol
French disdain for the word "philanthropist," particularly, wit
anti-slavery thought: "the philosophes gave birth to the philanth
négrophiles, who begat the white-eaters," concluding, "these
people in France find so intoxicating are poison in the tropics"
Chris Bongie [Petersborough, ON: Broadview, 2004], 96).
84 MARLENE L. DAUT
ery (that is to say, opposing slavery on moral rather t

grounds) haunts the philanthropic legacy of abolitionis
lyn Fick tells us:
Even the Société des Amis des Noirs, the one group that
for the immediate abolition of the slave trade . . . found
cally judicious to pose its arguments on humanitaria
grounds. For to directly attack the economic foundati
sues would be to attack the legitimacy of key sectors of
economy and formidable sources of the nation's wealth.3
The Munier family, comprising a lifelong slaveholder

turned slave leader, and an unapologetic slave ship cap
symbol for the tension between being against the inhuman
being unable to transcend its relationship to human capita
Abolitionist and pro-slavery debates over the ultim
humanity of the violence that was necessary in order
independence also expose the economic tensions of sla
foundations.34 The trope of the "inspired mulatto" not on
cabulary for the anxiety of an abolitionist philosophy t
anti-capitalist and therefore continued to uphold a syst
the slavery it wanted to abolish, but it also provided a lan
slave rebellion as too motivated by "racial" revenge to be e
has said that the French Revolution failed to "deal with th
lem of slavery" and universal human rights,35 my own re
other quandary: the failure of some transnational anti-slave
with the fundamental relationship between pro-slavery
tiques of the racialized violence of the Haitian Revolut
Implicit in the two centuries of debate over whether or
enment was liberative, meaning that its doctrines and
tained the capacity to provide or merely encourage lib
among all "men," is essentially a debate over the meaning
of the very terms "equality," "liberty," and "men." Articl
33- Fick, "The French Revolution in Saint-Domingue: A Triumph
Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbe
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 52.
34. Although Sidney Mintz argues that slavery's connection to capit
theoretically capitalism actually depends upon free labor, Mintz does
not know how to fit slave plantations into his picture of capitalism."
having written, " 'The fact that we now not only call the plantation ow
talists, but that they are capitalists, is based on their existence as ano
market based on free labour." See Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Pl
History (New York: Viking, 1985), 59.
35. Fick, "The French Revolution in Saint-Domingue," 70.
laration of the Rights of Man (1789) states that "Men are bor
and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded onl
eral good," while Article two reads: "the aim of all polit
the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rig
rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppr
sis).36 Nick Nesbitt has pointed out that the Declaration "w
to apply to Africans any more than was the American Dec
pendence."37 The Enlightenment and any "resistance to op
sanctioned were for (white) European males only. The
the justifications for revolution expressed in the Decla
lighted by the very demand for freedom, and its violent b
ity in Haiti, by people to whom these ideals were not supp
plied. In other words, the undeniable humanity of the slav
their self-defined ability (rather than their legally denied
lence to prove it.
In his "Proclamation à Gonaïves" (1804) addressing the
newly formed Haiti, Dessalines reminded the populace
only been won by the price of "your blood": "rememb
done nothing," he said:
if you do not provide to the nations of the world a terri

eous example of the vengeance that must be exercise
who are proud of having restored their liberty and are w
comes to protecting it; let us frighten anyone who wo
tempt to take it once again.38
It is precisely their resistance that was supposed to prove

Africans were men and not slaves, just as a similar instant
resistance led Frederick Douglass to proclaim in his 184
"You have seen how a man was made into a slave, now y
slave was made into a man."39
Acts of physical violence in order to demonstrate personhood presented
a distinct problem in a period that hailed itself as "the Age of Reason."40
European "Radical enlightenment," according to Jonathan Israel, "(usu
36. Declaration of the Rights of Man, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rightsof.asp,
accessed 31 December 2016.
37. Nesbitt, "The Idea of 1804," Yale French Studies, The Haiti Issue: 1804 and Nineteenth
Century French Studies 107 (2005): 27.
38. Quoted in Louis-Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre, Mémoire pour servir à l'histoire d'Haïti,
ed. Joseph Saint-Rémy (Paris: France Libraire, 1851), 4-5.
39. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, i960), 50.
40. See Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment (Maiden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing, 1997), 4.
86 MARLENE L. DAUT
ally) disavowed violence but openly embraced the principle

not necessarily in the sense of a general uprising then cert
of a general transformation of values, attitudes, and ins
Haitian revolutionists had become trapped in this parenthet
by being forced to commit what many in the late eigh
nineteenth centuries thought of as crimes against huma
revolutionists' "invention of the most barbaric and atroc
phrase used by the generally anti-slavery Olympe de Gou
opted to suggest that the "negroes" of Haiti were in violati
despite the equally "unnatural" condition of slavery to
been subjected.42 In 1802 René de Chateaubriand, a not
apologist and son of a slave-trader, famously echoed pre
ments when he asked, "who would dare to plead the cause o
ter the crimes they have committed?"43 Ultimately, Georg
tion fails because he remains not only locked within a cont
whereby he needs to dominate others in order to achieve a
defined by his skin color—the narrator tells us that Georg
task before him, a great problem to resolve. He had only on
of having been subjugated; now he had only one hope: t
ing" (121)—but also because in order to escape with his li
upon the very same system of capitalist domination that h
manity of color prejudice necessary.
Even if Dumas was as anti-slavery as he purports to be
Bissette, in Georges slavery and color prejudice are still cha
marily affective problems that could be cured by individua
and resistance. In Georges, after executing the traitor Anton
Lai'za, of whom Georges thinks, "there is a negro worthy o
feels an unwarranted sense of accomplishment (344). Thi
firms that the Haitian Revolution was about a single inst
ing resistance for Haitians rather than about general libert
peoples. Lai'za says, "Come, my friends... we are at last a
can die" (383). Moreover, upon escaping from the island
his love interest, but doing nothing to have ended slave
Malmédies, and presumably other colonists, continue to
and enslave human beings on the island), we are told of
hero: "Now, Georges could die; Georges had been reward
combat; he had struggled head to head with prejudice, and h
41. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of M

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 745.
42. de Gouges, L'Esclavage des noirs, ou l'heureux naufrage, drame en trois a
chez la veuve Duchesne, 1792), 5.
43. de Chateaubriand, Le Génie du Christianisme, 2 vols. (Paris: Ga
1966), 1:164.
an almost mortal wound, prejudice had been killed

Because Georges thinks that he has conquered color p
"the most difficult thing in the world" (by getting
woman to fall in love with him), he suddenly feel
last statement in the novel is Georges's own: "If I cou
you Sara, I would have wanted to die" (452).
Despite the fact that Georges has freed all of his ow
which is ambivalently modeled after the Haitian Rev
as a failure precisely because Georges never succeeds
ther the logic of slavery as a capitalist system or agai
alized prejudice. He only rebels against the feeling
color prejudice against him and other "worthy" "
deed, Georges can only demonstrate his empathy wit
rienced by enslaved people by evoking a fraternal m
says to Lord Murrey of his decision to join the slave
tion, "These men, whom you speak of with such scor
ers" (334). Georges's own color prejudices against t
faces when after the slaves indulge themselves in
rebellion, he thinks "everything was undone by the
loves l'eau-de-vie more than liberty" (343).
Color prejudice plays a predominant role even f
biological brother whose motto is "commerce ab
argues that he trades for "negroes" just as he would
including "sacks of sugar, boxes of rice or bales o
structures Jacques's "philosophie négrière" just as mu
ously prejudiced thoughts of M. de Malmédie who
"negroes were not men, they were machines taske
tain product" (126). Similarly, the narrator tells us th
trade
was a perfectly legal industry. He had for his entire life watched ne
groes being bought and sold; he thought, therefore, in his conscience,
that negroes were made for being bought and sold. As for the validity
of the right that men had claimed to traffic in their fellow-men, that
did not concern him at all; he bought and paid; therefore, the thing
was his, and he had the right to sell it. (233)44
But Jacques shows more than a Rousseauian contempt for slavery as a gen
eral condition when he attempts to convince Georges not to lead a revolt
of "negroes": "Negroes? Pah!" Jacques says, "Listen to me, Georges;
44- A footnote in Georges reminds us that the international slave trade had been officially
abolished by this time, but that many slave ships continued to operate under the guise of
transporting goods (233). Jacques, thus, would have been engaged in the illegal trafficking
of slaves.
88 MARLENE L. DAUT
I know them very well, I sell them; they withstand heat w

bananas ... ; they have some qualities, to be sure, I mea
depreciate my merchandise, but they make poor soldier
own prejudices go so far as to make him unwittingly c
raveling of the slave rebellion. Perfectly cognizant of his
ment, Jacques tells Lord Murrey that if as governor h
aware of a slave rebellion, he would defeat it by placing
hundred barrels of arrach [sugarcane whiskey], and I woul
my key in the door" (304).
James writes that even though slavery was, in his opi
class rather than a racial struggle, "to neglect the racial fac
dental is an error only less grave than to make it fund
own estimation, Georges reveals this powerful conundrum
tic slavery is shown to have structured human relations as
economic to such an extent that fully combating slave
both undermine capitalism and destroy the institution
supported it. Because this dual revolution fails to occur in
the transatlantic abolitionist movement), the Haitian Revo
in Georges feels much more like a tragedy, in the end, th
Georges, the personalized rebellion against color prejud
slavery only conquers these twin problems for a few p
island in the middle of a vast archipelago of capitalist suffe
itself thus registers primarily in affective, personal terms
cipled, material ones.
Contemporary reactions to Georges as a romance bea
cated way the novel trades in good feelings over good
Kincaid, recollecting upon some of the more Romantic
novel, has spoken of the "glory of Georges," saying that i
"the world in which I was growing up, in St. John's, Anti
landscape of Georges was an everyday reality. "46 The Cam
Calixthe Beyala has shared in that sense of "glory" by
claiming that, for her, Georges provides "a little light in
little less suffering in an ocean of tears, some more
loved."47 But I wonder if such feelings of victory, "glory
this deeply ambivalent text can ultimately be instrumenta
vice of arguments against either color prejudice or slavery
sympathies appear to be almost entirely with the patriarc
family, reluctant revolutionary that he is, when we are to
ing to leave his plantation,
45- James, Black Jacobins, 238.

46. Kincaid, Foreword, Georges, trans. Tina Klover, xiii.
47. Beyala quoted in Martone, Black Musketeer, 13.
[Pierre], embracing in the blink of an eye those rich f

manioc, and corn, magnificent groves of grapefruit . .
horizon of mountains that enclosed his vast property l
ral. He reflected that it had taken three generations of
him, hard-working like him, esteemed like him, to ma
the paradise of the island. He let out a sigh, wiped
then, turning his eyes away, shook his head. . . . (35
Encountering Dumas's novel so long after the revolut

tive evokes, the poverty of Georges's attempt to lead
freedom is made more apparent by the startling ima
heroes escaping from the island of their dispossession, l
intact, weeping about their centuries old lost plantations
unapologetic slave trader.
University of Virginia
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Haiti and the Black Romantics: Enlightenment and Color Prejudice After the Haitian

Revolution in Alexandre Dumas's "Georges" (1843)

Haiti and the Black Romantics:

Enlightenment and Color

Dumas's Georges (1843)

SiR, 56 (Spring 2017)

and characters found in Georges reflect Haitian revolution

politan writer like Dumas to France's overseas colonies, a

[m]any of the mulattoes having received their educ

Although the Haitian revolutionary figure Vincent O

stature of a drum major, arms like Hercules . . . prom

Much like many contemporary critics, Allinson attempted

7- de Mirecourt, Maison d'Alexandre Dumas et Compagnie (Paris: Chez

under the colonial system, Dumas's eponymous Geo

Alexandre Dumas was, in many ways, notoriously

9- Hoffman, Georges, 477.

ambivalent point of view concerning the ultimate effectiv

13- Abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique

been stronger, of negroes by mulattoes when the pow

large extent, James writes that "[mjulatto instability lies

19- James, Black Jacobins, 207.

vides the moment of crisis necessary for Georges

21. Hofiman, Georges, 496.

itself. This is because transatlantic slavery provided th

the "unprofitableness of West Indian monopoly," par

30. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 188.

ery (that is to say, opposing slavery on moral rather t

The Munier family, comprising a lifelong slaveholder

if you do not provide to the nations of the world a terri

It is precisely their resistance that was supposed to prove

ally) disavowed violence but openly embraced the principle

41. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of M

an almost mortal wound, prejudice had been killed

I know them very well, I sell them; they withstand heat w

45- James, Black Jacobins, 238.

[Pierre], embracing in the blink of an eye those rich f

Encountering Dumas's novel so long after the revolut

Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Sla

Beard, John Relly. The Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, th

Beecher, Jonathan. "Echoes of Toussaint Louverture a

Boisrond-Tonnerre, Louis-Félix. Mémoire pour servir à l'histoire d'Haïti.

Bonneau, Alexandre. "Les Noirs, les Jaunes, et la littérature française en

Chateaubriand, René de. Le Génie du Christianisme. 2 vols. Paris: Garnier

Declaration of the Rights of Man. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative o

Dumas, Alexandre. Georges.

. Georges or the Isle of Franc

Edgeworth, Maria. "The Gra

Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, ed

Faubert, Pierre. Ogé, ou le préju

Fick, Carolyn. "The French R

Fitzhugh, George. "Southern Thought." Debow's Review 23 (1857): 339.

Grégoire, Abbé de Henri. "Observations sur la constitution du Nord

. De la traite de l'esclavage des Noirs et des Blancs. Paris: Ad

Hoffmann, Léon-François. "Dumas et les Noirs." In Georges, 22-23.

Hugo, Victor. Bug-Jargal. Edited and translated by Chris Bongie.

Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Moder

James, C. L. R. The Black facobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San

DAUT, Marlene - Enlightment and Color Prejudice in Dumas' Georges (2017)

DAUT, Marlene - Enlightment and Color Prejudice in Dumas' Georges (2017)

DAUT, Marlene - Enlightment and Color Prejudice in Dumas' Georges (2017)