Revolution and the Making of Identities: France and Haiti, 1787-1804

An NEH summer seminar at the Newberry Library
Directed by Jeremy Popkin (University of Kentucky)
June 19 – July 21, 2006

This 5-week seminar for college and university instructors used the concept of identity as a focus for the study of these two revolutionary processes. This comparative approach brought new perspectives to the understanding of these movements on the two sides of the Atlantic, and to processes of social and cultural change more generally. Through discussion of common readings taken from primary sources, modern scholarly studies, and works of fiction about of these revolutions, the fourteen participants explored the ways in which the notion of revolution as a process of change in individual identities opens new perspectives for understanding these dramatic upheavals that marked the beginning of the modern era in the western world. Readings addressed changes in racial identification, gender roles, and religious identities. Through individual study and seminar discussions, participants looked at how those involved in these revolutions came to think of themselves as citizens, and what this meant in their lives; and examined how old identities were stigmatized and dissolved, and how opponents of the revolutionary movements were singled out.

Seminar particpants were encouraged to pursue personal research interests using the Library's collections.  The Newberry's French Revolution Collection is the largest body of printed source materials on the subject in North America; portions of the Ayer Collection concerned with the French in the Americas includes many rare materials on the Haitian movement. More generally, the Library has great strength in many materials relating to the topic of revolution beyond France and its colonies.  Select items from these collections are included in "Revolutionary France and Haiti, 1787-1804," a display inspired by the seminar.

Session 1 — Revolution and Identities: A Conceptual Framework
Issues:  How can concepts of personal and collective identity be applied to the understanding of the French Revolution?  What contributions to the understanding of identity concepts might emerge from studying a revolutionary crisis?

Pierre Bourdieu, “Outline of the Theory of Practice: Structures and the Habitus,” in G. Spiegel, ed., Practicing History, 179-98.

William Sewell, “Theory of Structure,” ch. 4 in Logics of History.

Mona Ozouf, “Regeneration” from Furet and Ozouf, eds., Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution.

S. Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” in Critical Inquiry 26 (2000), pp. 821-65. 

Session 2 — Social Identities in Old Regime France
Issues:  What was the repertoire of public personal identities in the Old Regime in France?  Were notions of identity under challenge before 1789, and what pressures were causing these changes?

Sarah Maza, “Luxury, Morality, and Social Change,” in Journal of Modern History, 1997. 

Colin Jones, “The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” in American Historical Review, 1996. 

William Reddy, “Sentimentalism and Its Erasure,” in Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000), pp. 109-52. 

Jay Smith, “Social Categories, the Language of Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution:  The Debate over noblesse commercante,” in Journal of Modern History 2000. 

Sue Peabody, “Crisis: Blacks in the Capital, 1762,” ch. 5 in There are No Slaves in France.

Session 3 — Identities in the French Caribbean
Issues:  What was the nature of pre-revolutionary society in France’s Caribbean colonies, and especially in Saint-Domingue?  How did the divisions in this society compare with those in pre-revolutionary France? 

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World, pp. 1-90.

Orlando Patterson, “Authority, Alienation, and Social Death,” ch. 3 (pp. 35-76) in Slavery and Social Death.

S. Mintz and M-R. Trouillot, “Social History of Haitian Vodou,” in D. Cosentino, ed., Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, pp. 123-47.

Sue Peabody, “A Dangerous Zeal: Catholic Missions to Slaves in the French Antilles,” in French Historical Studies 25 (2002), pp. 53-90.

Stewart King, “Planter Elites,” ch. 10 in Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint-Domingue.

Bernard Moitt, “Women and Labor: Slave Labor,” ch.3 in Women and Slavery in the French Antilles.

Session 4 — Defining Revolution
Issues:  What was the nature of the revolutionary processes that began in France in 1789, and in Saint-Domingue in 1791, and why did they have such a radical impact on the people involved in them?  In what ways did these revolutions compel individuals to rethink the nature of their identities?

William Sewell, “Historical Events as Transformations of Structures,” ch. 8 in Logics of History.

Keith Baker, “Revolution,” in Inventing the French Revolution

C.L.R. James, Black Jacobins, pp. 85-117.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as Non-Event,” in Silencing the Past.

David Patrick Geggus, “The Bois Caïman Ceremony,” ch. 6 in Haitian Revolutionary Studies.

Catherine Reinhardt, “French Caribbean Slaves Forge Their Own Ideal of Liberty in 1789,” in Doris Kadish, ed., Slavery in the Caribbean Francophone World (2000), pp. 19-38.  

Session 5 — The Haitian Revolution: From Rebellion to Independence
Issues:  How did the Haitian Revolution develop from a rebellion against slavery and racial prejudice into a movement for the creation of an independent nation?  What was the role of Toussaint Louverture in this process?  Was the outcome of the revolution inevitable?  Was there a genuine possibility that France and its colonies might have become a multi-racial republic?

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World, pp. 91-306.

Nick Nesbitt, “The Idea of 1804,” in Yale French Studies no. 107 (2005), pp. 6-38.   

Session 6 — First-person narratives as sources for understanding issues of identity
Issues: What special contributions can first-person narratives make to our understanding of how revolutionary crises affect participants’ identities?  What special problems are posed by the reading of witness narratives from a revolutionary event such as the Haitian uprising?

Jeremy Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: First-Person Narratives of the Haitian Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.  (Note: The manuscript of the then-unpublished book was made available to seminar participants.)

Session 7 — The Identity of the Citizen
Issues: What new identities did the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen create, both explicitly and implicitly?  What old-regime identities did it delegitimize?  Who was included in the concept of citizen?  Was the identity of ‘citizen’ conceivable in the colonial context?

Etienne Balibar, “Citizen Subject,” in Cadava et al., eds., Who Comes After the Subject? 

Michael Fitzsimmons, “The National Assembly and the Invention of Citizenship,” from Renée Waldinger et al., eds., The French Revolution and the Meaning of Citizenship.

Joan Scott, “‘A Woman Who Has Only Paradoxes to Offer’” in Melzer and Rabine, eds., Rebel Daughters.

John Garrigus, “‘Sons of the Same Father,’” in C. Adams et al., eds., Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth-Century France, pp. 137-54.

Vertus Saint-Louis, “Les termes de citoyen et Africain pendant la revolution de Saint-Domingue,” in L. Hurbon, ed., L’Insurrection des esclaves de Saint-Domingue (22-23 août 1791), pp. 75-95.

Session 8 — New Identities in the Private Sphere
Issues: How did the Revolution affect the separation between public and private life?  Were there changes in the ways individuals defined themselves within the family and in other aspects of their private life?

Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France.

Michael Sibalis, “Regulation of Male Homosexuality in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France,” in Merrick and Ragan, eds., Homosexuality in Modern France.

Session 9 — Making a Revolutionary Culture
Issues:  What did it mean to create a revolutionary culture, and how did people have to reconceive themselves to make this possible?

Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution.

Session 10 — Revolutionary Cultures and Contexts
Issues:  How did different groups participate in the new revolutionary cultures of France and Haiti?

Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, chs. 4-5.

Peter Jones, “A New Civic Landscape,” in Liberty and Locality in Revolutionary France, pp. 119-62.

Thornton, “’I am the Subject of the King of Congo’: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,”in Journal of World History 4 (1993), 181-214.

Carolyn Fick, “The Blacks React to Freedom,” in The Making of Haiti, pp. 157-82.

Ronald Schechter, “Constituting Differences: The French Revolution and the Jews,” from Obstinate Hebrews, pp. 150-91.

Session 11 — Art, Literature, and Issues of Identity
Issues: How can art and literature fiction help us understand the way in which revolutions affect identities?

Madison Smartt Bell, All Souls’ Rising, chs. 8 & 23.

Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety, pp. 493-534.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “Bodies and Souls: The Hatian Revolution and Madison Smartt Bell’s All Souls’ Rising” from Novel History (1991). 

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Black Revolution, Saint-Domingue: Girodet’s Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-Representative of the Colonies, 1797”, in Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 9-63.

Laura Mason, Singing the Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics 1787–1799, pp. 42-60.