Constitution of Haiti

Impact

The 1801 Constitution of Haiti was a short-lived document. In the estimation of Napoléon, Toussaint-Louverture had gone too far in writing a constitution for what was still a French colony. By 1801 Napoléon had signed peace treaties with many of his adversaries in the Napoleonic Wars, so he was able to turn his attention to internal problems—and to Haiti. Accordingly, he dispatched a fleet to the island, and by the end of February 1802 these forces had taken control of most of Haiti's cities and ports. Toussaint-Louverture and his generals, notably Jean-Jacques Dessalines, put up resistance, but the numbers were against them. Their only weapons were the large number of white hostages they held and Haiti's terrain, which forced the French to fight in jungles and to find their way around mountain gorges, where ambushes were a constant threat. The French, however, held a weapon of their own in the form of Toussaint-Louverture's two sons, who had been studying in France but who were in effect hostages. Running out of resources and with morale low among his troops, Toussant-Louverture surrendered and, on May 7, 1802, signed a peace agreement with the French. On May 20, 1802, Napoléon reestablished slavery in the French colonies.

Toussaint-Louverture retired to his farm, under house arrest. He continued to correspond with rebels and made plans for a new offensive against the French. At this point, an ally came to his aid: yellow fever. The illness devastated the French forces, reducing their numbers to fewer than ten thousand; General Leclerc died of the disease in November 1802. Meanwhile, news of Napoléon's reinstatement of slavery spread. Hostilities resumed and continued until November 18, 1803, when the rebels, led by General Dessalines, defeated the French at the Battle of Vertières. By the end of the year, all French troops had departed.

General Dessalines proclaimed Haitian independence on the first day of 1804. He, like Toussaint-Louverture, named himself governor-general for life, though on October 6 of that year he was crowned emperor as Jacques I. After massacring the French colonists who remained on the island, he instituted a system of serfdom to keep the sugar plantations running. Dessalines was assassinated on October 17, 1806, and at that point the country split. In the north, Henri Christophe, one of Toussaint-Louverture's generals, was elected president and, on March 26, 1811, was crowned King Henri I. The south proclaimed itself a republic under the presidency of Alexandre Pétion, another of Toussaint-Louverture's generals and Christophe's rival for power. Some observers alleged that Pétion may have been complicit in the assassination of Dessalines, but this charge was never proved. Still, power appears to have corrupted Pétion, who came to find his earlier democratic ideals restrictive and who suspended the legislature in 1816 until his death in 1818. Meanwhile, Haiti—or parts of it—had been governed by constitutions promulgated in 1804, 1805, 1806, 1807, 1811, and 1816. Numerous other constitutions followed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As of this writing, Haiti is ruled by its constitution of 1987.

Although Toussaint-Louverture's vision of Haiti did not last, at least not in its entirety, the rebellion he helped lead and the constitution he wrote had profound significance. In the words of Michel-Rolph Trouillot (p. 83), “the Haitian revolution was unthinkable in its time: it challenged the very framework within which proponents and opponents had examined race, colonialism, and slavery in the Americas.”