Stella. Emeric Bergeaud

of liberty, and Haiti as the realization of the French Revolution’s republican ideals of freedom, equality, and brotherhood. Stella tells of the devastation of colonialism and slavery in the colony of Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was known before independence, and it chronicles the events of the Haitian Revolution, which is portrayed as a bloody yet just fight for emancipation and a period of sacrifice that all future Haitians are charged to honor and remember. While Stella provides a captivating and admirable origin story for Haiti and Haitians, the fact that it was out of print for more than one hundred years means that the novel has struggled to fulfill its author’s wish of attracting a wider readership to his nation’s history.

When Bergeaud wrote Stella in the late 1840s and into the 1850s, he was living in exile on the small Caribbean island of Saint Thomas (now part of the U.S. Virgin Islands). When the novel was finally published in 1859, it appeared in Édouard Dentu’s busy Parisian bookshop rather than on the bookshelves of Charlotte Amalie or Port-au-Prince.1 Bergeaud had given the manuscript to his friend and relative, the historian and politician Beaubrun Ardouin (1796–1865), also in exile, when the two were together in Paris in 1857. After Bergeaud’s death the next year, Ardouin had his friend’s novel published in the City of Lights. It was never printed in Haiti. That Stella appeared in Haiti’s former colonial capital was due as much to Bergeaud’s personal circumstances and Haitian politics as it was to the cachet of the nineteenth-century Parisian literary scene.

The legacy of the novel’s publication history, Bergeaud’s particular blending of history and fiction, as well as an unfortunate general hostility toward early Haitian literature continue to influence how Stella has been received over the last century and a half. Despite Stella’s strong message against slavery, colonialism, and the racism intrinsic to these systems, the novel has been understudied. The few studies of Stella that exist—and in this sense, Bergeaud’s novel is representative of a wider trend in the reception of early Haitian literature—have tended to view the novel as derivative of French literary models and therefore imperfect or unworthy of study. The bases for these dismissals, and the novel itself, deserve to be reexamined.2

The goal of this introduction is to contextualize Stella’s political and literary world for an English-speaking audience. Here, we provide a brief overview of the history that Stella relates, for while the novel certainly provides insight into the political and social conflicts of Bergeaud’s world, a reader unfamiliar with the intricate details of Haitian history may find following the novel’s allegorical account of the nation’s founding challenging.3 In making Stella and the story of Haitian history that it recounts available to Anglophone readers and thereby introducing the novel to a new generation of scholars, it is our hope that Haiti’s first novel will find its place within a revitalized study of early Haitian literature.

      Early Haitian Politics

From Émeric Bergeaud’s birth just over a decade after Haiti’s independence to his death in exile forty years later, the life of Stella’s author was deeply connected to the fortune of his country. Jean-Pierre Boyer (1776–1850) became the second president of Haiti the year that Bergeaud was born. Boyer went on to rule Haiti, and later the entire island of Hispaniola, for most of the novelist’s life. Boyer, who fought in the Revolution, was born part of a small but powerful group of free Euro-African people known as gens de couleur (free people of color).4 Before independence in 1804, some gens de couleur played a role in French politics; after 1804, many members of this population and their descendants were active in Haiti’s early governments. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, this group maintained political and economic control of the country; known for their support of Boyer and then later the maintenance of his status quo, members of this group were often referred to as “Boyerists.”

Bergeaud was born into this wealthy, well-educated, Boyerist class of early Haitians in the southwestern city of Les Cayes. This city had been the home of another important gens de couleur military leader of the Revolution, André Rigaud (1761–1811), who designated it the capital of his secessionist Department of the South, which Bergeaud’s uncle, General Jérôme-Maximilien Borgella (1773–1844), led from 1811 to 1812.5 Between 1807 and 1819, another autonomous region existed in the neighboring area of Grand’Anse, which was comprised of slaves-turned-farmers and led by the former maroon Goman. As part of Boyer’s centralizing plan, Borgella helped to reabsorb Goman’s region into the Republic in 1820, although the area continued to remain out of direct political control from Port-au-Prince.6 In Bergeaud’s youth, he worked as Borgella’s personal secretary, thus learning about Haitian regional and national politics—and about the factions that split his country—at an early age.

Many gens de couleur had both French and African ancestry, and before the Revolution some had completed their schooling or military training in France. This sector of the population often included people free before the 1793 decree abolishing slavery in Saint-Domingue, and many of them had themselves owned slaves. Even after independence, descendants of the gens de couleur continued to look to France as a source of education and culture. For this reason, Haitian elites were often accused of “francophilia,” preferring French or “Frenchified” culture over African and creole traditions, and of holding power in such a way as to exclude and denigrate—both politically and culturally—the African-descended majority in Haiti. For example, the 1835 Penal Code criminalized the practice of Vodou, which was seen as including acts of “spell-making” (sortilège), along with the creation of various kinds of potions and amulets.7 Stella’s editor, Beaubrun Ardouin, who was elected to the Haitian Senate in 1832, helped to pass these anti-Vodou laws. Elite Haitians also distanced themselves from the African-descended majority—often inhabitants of rural areas who had only enjoyed freedom after 1793 and their offspring—in the realm of language as well: for while most people in colonial Saint-Domingue and nineteenth-century Haiti spoke a language that combined French with African languages—an earlier, noncodified version of current-day Haitian Kreyòl—only some of the population spoke both Kreyòl and French. In the colonial period, French was the language of power; after independence, access to spoken—and especially written—French marked the wealthy and educated apart from the rest of Haitian society. Thus, literacy in French ensured access to the avenues of political power and influence, and guaranteed that political and cultural power would remain with a small group of Francophone Haitians.8 These regulations and exclusive practices were designed not just to maintain power within one group, or to denigrate the black majority; they were also about presenting a certain image of Haiti to the international community in the face of persistent anti-Haitianism in France and the United States. These anti-Haitian attitudes stemmed from prejudice against a nation whose foundation rested upon the complete opposition to the economically powerful institution of slavery.

When the Republic of Haiti was proclaimed on January 1, 1804, the new country became the second postcolonial nation in the Americas and the first to be built from a successful revolution against slavery. From 1791 to the Revolution’s end in 1804, Haitians saw countless acts of violence, and they suffered years of terror, famine, and hardship. Yet, by 1804, Haiti’s people—most of whom had been slaves under French rule—emerged as citizens. From that moment, they swore to “live independent or die.”9 Yet, as is often the case for new countries, Haiti struggled in its early years. As a result, Haiti was often called upon by members of the international community, especially France, to justify its freedom.

Soon after independence, Haiti’s