Liberté in Post-Independence Haiti
I’m a huge fan of Dr. Chelsea Stieber’s book Haiti’s Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Haitian Nation. In the book, she tackles head-on the fraught concept of liberté in early post-independence Haiti. A profound ideological clash emerged at the time, defining the very soul of the fledgling nation.
In the years following the revolution, two rival visions of postcolonial statehood competed for hegemony, each articulating radically different futures for Haiti as a Black abolitionist state. These factions, the Dessalineans and the republicans, shared a commitment to freedom from chattel slavery but diverged fundamentally in their conceptions of what liberté meant for the individual and the state.
The Dessalineans saw liberté primarily as national independence—freedom from colonial rule and domination. To them, the collective sovereignty of the state was paramount, even at the expense of individual liberties. Dessalines’s empire was founded on a radical anticolonial vision, rejecting not only European domination but also the political liberalism of the Enlightenment. For the Dessalineans, humanity and freedom were not abstract ideals guaranteed by foreign philosophies, but realities forged through the Haitian Revolution itself. This liberté was grounded in action, a deliberate assertion of autonomy wrested from the grasp of imperial powers and defined entirely on Haitian terms.
Conversely, the republicans, inspired by the language and ideals of the French Enlightenment, sought to position Haiti as a beacon of liberal republicanism in the Atlantic world. As Stieber explains, for the republicans, liberté encompassed individual rights, political equality, and resistance to arbitrary governance. They embraced the revolutionary rhetoric of France’s First Republic, seeking to fulfill its egalitarian promises in Haiti, where France had failed. For them, freedom was inseparable from the Enlightenment’s universalist ideals, and the Haitian republic was a chance to demonstrate that these principles could transcend racial boundaries.
Stieber’s work highlights that these competing philosophies of liberté were more than abstract debates; they were “mutually exclusive” foundations for governance, expressed through both armed conflict and an intellectual guerre de plume. Each faction defined itself in opposition to the other, performing its vision of liberté not only within Haiti but also in dialogue with the broader revolutionary Atlantic.
Yet, as Stieber emphasizes, both Dessalineans and republicans challenged the hypocrisies of the Enlightenment in their own ways. The Dessalineans rejected the universalism of liberalism as a tool of colonial domination, while the republicans sought to demonstrate its unfulfilled promise. Together, they reshaped liberté not as a European ideal but as a Haitian reality, forged through self-liberation and revolutionary struggle.
By situating these ideological conflicts in the context of Haiti’s early post-independence writing, Stieber reveals the complexity of Haiti’s foundational debates. In their contest for liberté, these leaders articulated a vision of freedom that transcended their divisions, challenging the Atlantic world to reconsider the meaning of liberty itself.