The Black Jacobins

by C.L.R. James

C.L.R. James gives a detailed and gripping story of the revolution that led to the declaration of an independent Haiti in 1803. I didn’t try to keep track of the individual skirmishes and leaders, but the overall picture is fascinating and enriched by the details that James gives.

His start, provocatively titled The Property, is a memorable picture of the life that Haitian slaves faced, and why they fought so strongly for freedom. This was not an abstract notion, but a daily struggle that meant life, death, pain, family, food and more. It’s the reason for violent revolution.

James goes on to describe the complex relationships between the “property” and the small number of free, property-owning blacks, the land-owning whites, the “small” whites, and the people of mixed heritage. As all of these groups had their own interests in relation to land and property in San Domingo and to the colonial powers in France, they looked at the slave revolt from a perspective of identity, but primarily from the perspective of how it would affect their own assets.

This becomes a critical factor as the revolution plays out, with different factions forming alliances and compromises as they attempt to protect their own interests. It’s interesting that all of the factions, and at times some of the former slave leaders, consider – or actively work toward – reinstituting slavery as the only way to restore the economic base of the island, whether as a colony or an independent country. As a result, the freed slaves were ruthless and violent in destroying restoration factions, and faced ruthless repression as well.

The story has many layers, but James keeps it understandable, even for someone like me who does not have much knowledge of the times. As he shows, the complex interaction of class and racialized status makes simple analysis impossible, and no clear path or outcome was predictable. This remains true even today when identity politics is at the forefront, but class retains a powerful force. As he puts it, “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it so fundamental.”

Especially interesting for me was James’ description of the situation in France, and the impact of the revolution of 1793. The economic significance of the San Domingo colony, and what James calls the “maritime bourgeoisie” that owned properties and got obscenely wealthy on the colonial trade, was the backbone of the rising class that overthrew the old French regime. Their bourgeois revolution to raise the trading class also led to the uprising of the lower classes, who opposed slavery in spite of the bourgeois attempts in the new French parliament to preserve it. So the French San Domingo colonies not only created the economic conditions that drove the French revolution, but also created the conditions that undermined it in favour of a (short-lived) proletarian revolution.

This of course was reversed after the bourgeoisie regained power in the assembly. James’ description of the intrigues and interests playing out in the national assembly gave me an understanding of the meaning of the French revolution that I knew very little of before. Reading those chapters has made me want to find out more about the French revolution if I can find a book that lays it out as clearly as James does. It’s also interesting to see how the English foreign strategy used slavery and a pretense of opposing it to undermine their rivals for economic power in the Caribbean.

The clarity of James’s description and analysis make it clear why his book is viewed as such a model and inspiration among revolutionary thinkers.