Stella. Emeric Bergeaud

de la littérature haïtienne de l’indépendance à nos jours (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Théodire, 1960): 29.

30 Brière, Haïti et la France: 6.

31 The use of the term “indigenous” connected early Haitians to the native Taíno Arawak population of the island, as did the choice of the name “Ayiti.” In our translation, we have kept the French term “Indigène” for this reason.

32 France was rapidly expanding its colonial empire during the second half of the seventeenth century. By 1665, it had also established a colony on the Île Bourbon (La Réunion); others followed on Chandernagore and Pondichéry in 1673–1674, and modern-day Senegal in 1677. France’s colonial expansion increased dramatically in the following two centuries.

33 For more information on French legal code involving slavery, see Sue Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

34 Many colonists admitted that the law was hard to implement, including Jean-Philippe Garran-Coulon in his Rapport sur les troubles de Saint-Domingue (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1798–1799), IV: 26, which was published during the Haitian Revolution.

35 The eighteenth-century colonist Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry provides extensive details about the diversity of the population of late Saint-Domingue and describes a complex system of categorization based on color and status. See Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie Française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (Philadelphia, 1797–1798).

36 See the database of marronage history at the University of Sherbrooke: http://marronnage.info/en/index.html.

37 Dubois, Avengers: 39. The number of enslaved African workers brought to Saint-Domingue reached its peak in 1790, with the arrival of forty-eight thousand people in one year.

38 As we have mentioned, many leading Haitian politicians, including the sons of Toussaint Louverture, received education in France.

39 Léon-François Hoffmann, Littérature d’Haïti (Vanves: EDICEF, 1995): 12. The majority of French ships destined for the Atlantic slave trade left France from the port city of Nantes, although for a few years before the Revolution this ignominious honor went to Bordeaux. See Éric Saugera, Bordeaux, Port Négrier: XVIIe–XIXe siècles (Paris: Karthala, 1995).

40 Dubois, Avengers: 30.

41 See Marlene Daut, Tropics of Haiti: A Literary History of Race and Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). These examples all counter the idea that the genre of the novel did not develop in Haiti until the late nineteenth century.

42 For more on early Haitian literature, see Hénock Trouillot, Les Origines sociales de la littérature haïtienne (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie N. A. Théodore, 1962): 15. For an excellent reading of the Haitian constitutions as literature, see Maximilien Laroche, “Histoire d’Haïti et Histoire du roman haïtien. La Littérature et l’Histoire comme contrats sociaux,” Cahiers des Anneaux de la Mémoire 7 (2004): 233–251. See also Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011).

43 Boisrond-Tonnerre’s memoir, which has been criticized for its too partisan (pro-Dessalines) account, was published by Joseph Saint-Rémy in 1851.

44 The first account of the ceremony was written by a Frenchman, Antoine Dalmas, in his Histoire de la Révolution de Saint-Domingue (Paris: chez Mame frères, 1814). The story has become legendary, even as its specifics are hard to verify. It is not known how many details Dumesle acquired from oral histories gathered among residents of northern Haiti and how much he borrowed from Dalmas’s account.

45 Louis-Phillipe Dalembert and Lyonet Trouillot, Haïti, une traverse littéraire (Paris: Éditions Phillipe Rey/Culturesfrance, 2010): 14.

46 Émile Nau, “Littérature,” L’Union: Recueil commercial et littéraire 14 (November 16, 1837): 4.

47 See Ardouin, Études I: 9.

48 Pompée-Valentin Baron de Vastey, Le système colonial dévoilé (Cap-Henry: Chez P. Roux, 1814): 94.

49 Léon-François Hoffmann mentions this connection in his Essays on Haitian Literature (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1984): 111. Many of these abolitionist stories appear in the 1820s, after Britain’s 1807 abolition of the slave trade, the tenuous Congress of Vienna’s 1815 condemnation of the slave trade, and the 1821 formation of the pro-abolition group Société de la Morale chrétienne. The novel’s one-word title, the name of its main character, equally reflects a literary trend of its time, but in Bergeaud’s novel, Stella names more than just one individual: she is the earthly incarnation of divinely inspired Liberty, the “Star of Nations.”

50 In The French Atlantic Triangle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), Christopher Miller identifies France’s approach as a “calculated plan for forgetting” Haiti (246).

51 In Haiti, History, and the Gods, Dayan points to Ardouin as exemplary of an elite Haitian population who wished to “progress away from the dark continent” (16). This criticism of “francophilia” became a common way of reading French influence on Haitian literature, especially after Jean Price-Mars’s theory of “bovarysme,” which was developed during the American occupation of the early twentieth century. While Price-Mars meant to encourage his compatriots to embrace African culture, the concept of bovarysme has often been used to denigrate Haitian artists as derivative or lacking in innovation.

52 Hoffmann, Essays: 121. In current-day Haiti, the Ficus carica is called a “French fig” to distinguish it from a Haitian fig, which is a type of banana.

53 Émile Nau, “Littérature”: 4.

54 According to Hoffmann,