Haitian Divorce: C.L.R. James’ Two Concepts of History in The Black Jacobins
I only know of one France. That of the Revolution. That of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Too bad for the Gothic cathedral. - Aimé Césaire, 1941
In overthrowing me, you have cut down in San Domingo only the trunk of the tree of liberty. It will spring up again by the roots for they are numerous and deep. – Toussaint L’Ouverture, 1802
I will not be surprising anyone by saying that C.L.R. James was a historian. To be a historian though is to have an idea of not only what it is to study history, but a theory of what history is: how it works, what drives it, its causal nature. Yet the work of history does not proceed top down, from theory to raw data. On occasion the record fights back, one history hints at another. In James’ seminal The Black Jacobins two concepts of history are at play. One he is explicit about. He believes that men make history, but they do not choose their conditions. This idea, a paraphrase from Karl Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is something we will return to at the close of this piece. James’ text navigates the space between men, history and conditions. Yet, in doing so James also point towards another conception of history, one that problematizes the very notion of historical conditions and with it its implicit teleology. For his focus on the men who make history – both ordinary and great – is undermined by his vision of teleological history.
That is the ground I intend to cover, but let us go back to the start of the text. I mean this about as literally as possible, let us examine the title of the book as it appears on the cover. “The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution” is the book’s full title. It presents us with the triangulation of three aspects of James’ study: the masses, the great man who led them and the context, or conditions of their actions, which is in this case located with the proper name of San Domingo. We might thus expect The Black Jacobins to balance these aspects. The preface to the first edition, however, tells us that “the individual leadership responsible for this unique achievement [the only successful slave revolt in history] was almost the work of a single man – Toussaint L’Ouverture.” This indicates a sympathy for what is often referred to as the ‘Great Men’ theory of history, the idea that powerful and singular individuals wield immense influence on the course of history. James proceeds carefully from here, noting that “Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint. And even that is not the whole truth.” One might expect this shift to indicate that James believes there is a dynamic between the masses and the great men of history and that his intention is to balance both. This is not how the text proceeds, however. Instead James claims:
Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment. To portray the limits of those necessities and the realization, complete or partial, of all possibilities, that is the true business of the historian.
James drops the question of the conflict between the masses and the great men who lead them, replacing it with the an argument about the conditions history imposes on action. What this does is replace a discussion of dynamics between these two factors and how they might undermine and reinforce each other with an appeal to force outside this dynamic, in this case the force of history itself. This is to say nothing more than that what happened must have happened. Again, we will return to this end point in the closing remarks. This conflict between masses, great men, and history appears clearly in two chapters drawn from the start and end of the book: Chapter 1, ‘The Property’ and Chapter 12 ‘The Bourgeoisie Prepare to Restore Slavery’.
In the first chapter James begins normally enough. Here is the history of the popular historian: facts, figures and a nice touch of testimony from some impossibly named noblemen. Yet as this is a history of both slaves and slavery, James’ provides a sketch of the lives of the slaves of Santo Domingo, who remain, no matter what cruelty they face, “quite invincibly human beings; with the intelligence and resentments of human beings.” The topic of slave intelligence occupies several pages. The slaves display wooden stupidity in the face of their masters, but when gathered away from the eyes of their masters display “remarkable liveliness of intellect and vivacity of spirit.” Here already in James, is everything you need to get you to another James: James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak, in which the ordinary intelligence of slaves, servants and peasants is emphasized, often exactly in this way James’ describes: idiots in front of their masters, intelligent amongst themselves.
This intelligence was not invisible to westerners. James cites De Wimpffen as well as Hilliard d’Auberteuil whom wrote “no species of men has more intelligence” and subsequently had his book banned. Further to this intelligence was resistance, mostly unorganized but widespread. Poisonings were extremely common as was marronage – the term for running away from a plantation and thus slavery - and in the 1750s a rebellion attempt, led by the one handed escaped slave Mackandal, nearly succeeded in poisoning the colonial masters of San Domingo. The goal of this uprising was not just death and destruction but emancipation. It failed when Mackandal was betrayed.
Why does James discuss the intelligence of the slaves of San Domingo? Why the need for the account of their purposeful ignorance, which undermines the colonists’ accounts of slave stupidity? Why discuss resistance and the failed rebellion of Mackandal? Earlier in the book James points out that “one does not need education or encouragement to cherish a dream of freedom.” The intelligence of the slaves, the strategies of resistance and dissimulation are the raw materials of human character required for the emergence of figure like Toussaint. Recall Toussaint’s quote above, that he is but a trunk from the tree of liberty from which another will grow. This produces another question, the question of the necessity of these events. History, afterwards, has unfolded as it has and we establish the clear links from one moment to another and its failures and its successes both appear as destined. For history in the making things are not so clear. Walter Benjamin, in his essay the Storyteller writes:
’A man who dies at the age of thirty-five,’ said Moritz Heimann once, ‘is at every point of his life a man who dies at the at the age of thirty-five.’ Nothing is more dubious than this sentence- but for the sole reason that the tense is wrong. A man – so says the truth that was meant here – who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five. In other words, the statement that makes no sense for real life becomes indisputable for remembered life.
This passage highlights the move from contingency to necessity after the fact of an event. James understands necessity as inbuilt, which is to say his conception of history, especially when he appeals to historical conditions is teleological and mistakes remembrance for ontological fact.
The failure of Mackandal for James is not a contingency, because the Haitian Revolution required the breakdown of the balance of powers between “the proprietors of San Domingo, The French bourgeoisie and the British bourgeoisie.” Here James glosses over the question of conditions – something Mackandal indicates, that emancipation and organization are within the grasps of the slave of San Domingo, for the question of condition. There is one thing that must break from revolution to be possible. Yet in describing this James has revealed a counter history and the fertile grounds for change, in doing history from below he is undermining his metahistorical beliefs about historical conditions and necessity.
All this is to say that to make the point that conditions matter James must tell a story of a failed uprising, to highlight the interaction between Toussaint and the masses he must stress the intelligence of the masses, in doing so a question begins to emerge of what, exactly, a historical condition is, how determined it is and what place there is for contingency in such a history? This is to say the very reconstruction of historical necessity and conditions begs the questions of historical contingency.
These questions reoccur in the chapter 12. This chapter is, in part, about Napoleon Bonaparte’s plans to invade Haiti (formerly San Domingo) and restore slavery after the revolution. More so it is about how Toussaint, whilst fully aware of Bonaparte’s plans, sawed off “the branch upon which he sat.” How so? Tension had arisen because many blacks, although no longer slaves, still worked for whites. Moise, the commandant of the North Province, became the figurehead of this objection. Moise was Toussaint’s nephew, and when an insurrection broke out in the north, it was to cries of “Long Live Moise!” Moise was arrested and shot. Afterwards Toussaint introduced a series of laws “surpassing in severity anything he had yet decreed.” While breaking the morale of the black masses he sought to reassure the whites. Toussaint, with an invasion heading for his shores, was unable to maintain cohesion in Haiti. In a word Toussaint had lost the trust of the masses, and without them he was no great man. Once again this is a place in the text where James, confronted with the dynamic between the masses and great men and a question of decisions and making history shifts to a discussion of historical conditions. This time the argument is negative. James writes:
What should Toussaint have done? A hundred and fifty years of history and the scientific study of revolution begun by Marx and Engels, and amplified by Lenin and Trotsky, justify us in pointing to an alternative course.
This alternative course is one where instead of mistrusting the masses, Toussaint explains the role of the whites in the new society of Haiti, incorporates them but limits their role. For Lenin it was a problem of proletarian and bourgeoisie, but the problematic, of incorporating the remnants of the old oppressive regime, was the same and Lenin succeeded. As James writes:
Lenin kept the party and the masses thoroughly aware of every step, and explained carefully the exact position of the bourgeois servants of the Worker’s State, Toussaint explained nothing, and allowed the masses to think that their old enemies were being favoured at their expense. In allowing himself to be looked upon as taking the side of the whites against the blacks, Toussaint committed the unpardonable crime in the eyes of a community where the whites stood for so much evil.
Why turn to Lenin to discuss the idea that without the masses, Toussaint is nothing? James will later go on to say that Toussaint’s fateful choice, to shoot Moise and betray the masses, could not have been otherwise:
Toussaint’s error sprang from the very qualities that made him what he was. It is easy to see today, as his generals saw after he was dead, where he had erred. It does not mean that they or any of us would have done better in his place. If Dessalines could see so clearly and simply, it was because the ties that bound this uneducated soldier to French civilization were of the slenderest. He saw what was under his nose so well because he saw no further. Toussaint’s failure was the failure of enlightenment, not of darkness.
Here we are confronted with both the claim that the answers to Toussaint’s problem emerge after 150 years of revolutionary study, and that Toussaint could not have done otherwise. Once again James’ question of the relationship between the masses and great men and the choices they make becomes a question of historical conditions and inevitability.
In the 18th Brumaire Marx famously says: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” James is fond of this line and alludes to it often. James appears to take it to mean that revolution proceeds under conditions, that the time must be ripe, that men can seize opportunity but not create it. I’m not so sure this is what Marx means. The rest of Marx’s quote continues:
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language…In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.
Marx is here not making a claim to historical necessity, but rather pointing out that in the struggle for the new – a new order, a new situation, a new way of being – the language of the old must be adopted. The conditions are the available discursive resources, the images and terms used to articulate the new. The very struggle to articulate and make this, however, is not in this passage limited by the historical conditions. The dynamic between the masses and Toussaint, the great man, is not something James dwells on, he resolves it every time through appeal to historical conditions. That this dynamic, this source of tension might generate both success and failure, that history might be a question of decisions – decisions under condition perhaps, but decisions nonetheless – is a question James resolutely avoids. Historical conditions, the telos of revolutionary history, comes to stand in for a difficult question of how this dynamic plays out, how we go from the intelligence of the slaves of San Domingo to the revolution. This a question of two concepts of history both at play in this text, a self-generating history from below, and the historically determined dynamic of impersonal forces, the confident belief in the self-destruction of the bourgeoisie. The difficulty in managing these two approaches is the task James confronted, and it is the task we must also confront in thinking, that is to say philosophizing, about history. We must ask what a philosophy of history that takes seriously the ordinary intelligence of all requires, what a history of always possible progress means for our standard ideas of progress, and what a revolutionary history means for how we understand the paths not travelled.