Today in Haitian History - October 17, 1806 – Assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines
Born a slave in 1758, Jean-Jacques Dessalines rose to become one of the most important military figures of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). He served as Haiti’s first head of state, initially as “Gouverneur Général” and then as emperor, until his assassination in the fall of 1806.
Dessalines’s office remains difficult to fully assess. While, by all accounts, he ruled as a despotic leader and, very much in the same fashion of Toussaint Louverture before him, ignored the needs of the nouveaux libres (former slaves), more recent scholarship suggests that he attempted to carry out a more complex national project. The 1805 Constitution, which for many remains one of Dessalines’ greatest achievement as leader of independent Haiti, made clear in Article 14 that “the Haytians shall hence forward be known only by the generic appellation of Blacks.” For Sibylle Fischer (2004), this represented an important break from the colonial period. She stresses that “from the taxonomic lunacy of a colony that had more than one hundred different terms to refer to different degrees of racial mixture and color, we moved to a generic denomination: black.” In an attempt at state and nation building, “black” was to serve as part of the new country’s identity. While Dessalines, like his predecessor, favoured a form of “militarised” agricultural production and gave “citizens” of the new nation the choice of either being soldiers and labourers, historians like Claude Moïse (1988) have noted how the 1805 constitution presented clear dispositions guaranteeing personal liberty (such as articles five and six) suggesting yet another attempt at breaking away from the arbitrary law that embodied most of Haiti’s colonial history.
The achievements of 1805 could not temper the mounting opposition to Dessalines’s style of governing. Through colour politics have led many to simply imagine dissidence against Dessalines as an affair opposing the anciens libres (personified by Alexandre Pétion) and the nouveaux libres (embodied by Dessalines himself), Dessalines had also managed to alienate the former slaves, the very people his leadership should have served. While trying to crush a rebellion in the South headed by the “mulâtre” fraction of the elite, he was ambushed and murdered in October 1806.
In her article “Revolutionary Commemorations: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haitian Independence Day, 1804–1904” (2016), Erin Zavitz analysed how the memory of Dessalines appeared and disappeared from collective memory and state-sponsored celebrations of Haiti’s founding throughout the nineteenth-century. In many ways, it was only during the preparations leading up to Haiti’s centennial anniversary in 1904 that true efforts were made to reintegrate Dessalines as the founding figure of Haiti’s independence. Today, despite remaining a controversial figure, most Haitians proudly sing “La Dessalinienne” on January 1rst.
Image: “Mural on wall of Lycée Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Port-au-Prince.” Courtesy of: Paul Clammer (2016).
Every moment counts; let's capture them.