plantation, the brothers are motivated to revolt by the violent death of their mother, Marie the African. Much of Stella follows the two sons, who represent multiple historical figures, through the events of the Haitian Revolution. The novel’s dedication to history means that its storyline recounts, usually in symbolic or allegorical form, nearly all the complex details of Haiti’s founding.
Stella dates the crime of Marie’s death to the year 1789, amid a period of great political upheaval in France. Debate over the question of slavery in particular intensified in France in 1788 with the formation of the first French abolitionist society: the Société des Amis des Noirs. Influenced by British abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and William Wilberforce, the Société sought the amelioration of the conditions of enslaved people.23 Indeed, few antislavery thinkers in the 1780s were arguing for an immediate end to slavery; in 1781, the Marquis de Condorcet, for example, had argued for a process of gradual emancipation.24 For many revolutionaries, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen that was written in 1789 placed the principles of chattel slavery in question.25 Heated arguments over the extent to which the rights to freedom and equality applied to all people were heard throughout France and in the French colonies. Saint-Domingue, a colony fueled by enslaved labor, featured heavily in these debates.26
Stella highlights the connection between France and Saint-Domingue at this time. Initially, many gens de couleur residents of the colony who were not represented in the newly formed National Assembly in Paris protested their exclusion. In 1790, frustrated by the slow expansion of republican rights to free people of color, Vincent Ogé (1755–1791), an influential Saint-Domingue planter, traveled to Paris and, with fellow gens de couleur planter Julien Raimond (1744–1801), argued for their rights in the French National Assembly.27 Upon his return to Saint-Domingue, a frustrated Ogé and an accomplice, Jean-Baptiste Chavannes (1748–1791), led a revolt that was quickly put down by the colonial government. Ogé and Chavannes were brutally executed. Although they were fighting for the rights of the gens de couleur rather than for all of the colony’s people, Bergeaud depicts Ogé and Chavannes as early martyrs to Haiti’s cause of independence.
Though Stella lauds these men’s sacrifice, the sons’ attack on the Colonist’s plantation, where they find the divine incarnation of Liberty, can be understood to coincide with what is often considered the beginning of the Haitian Revolution: August 21, 1791, when enslaved people initiated a full-scale uprising. Though it is believed that the seed of revolution was planted during a religious service known as the Bois Caïman (Bwa Kayiman) ceremony, led by houngan Dutty Boukman (d. 1791) and mambo Cécile Fatiman in August 1791, this event does not feature in Stella.28 Instead, the divine figure of Stella encourages and guides the brothers in their revolt. The sons’ attempt to avenge their mother’s death begins with setting fire to the Colonist’s mansion. During this attack, the brothers come across a young woman whom they initially take to be the Colonist’s daughter. An unknown force prevents them from killing her, and Romulus and Remus find that they have rescued a fellow sufferer. The woman—Stella—had been in Paris during the revolutionary period of 1789, but fled to Saint-Domingue at the beginning of the Terror. Stella originally met the Colonist in Paris, but rejected his advances; when she landed in Saint-Domingue they met again, and emboldened there, he took her to his mansion as his prisoner. Stella pledges to aid the brothers in their mission to free Saint-Domingue and avenge their mother’s death in return for their help in liberating her from the Colonist.
As the Haitian Revolution progressed, fighting between European powers and among the diverse population of late Saint-Domingue contributed to a complex story of multiple power struggles, which Bergeaud attempts to outline in his novel. In 1793, republican France declared war on Britain; on the island, Spain sided with Britain against France. At this time, many former slaves—including Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803), Jean François (d. 1805), Jeannot (d. 1791), and Georges Biassou (1741–1801)—joined the Spanish forces in fighting against republican France, believing that the Crown, not the Republic, had their best interests at heart. In order to convince these fighters otherwise, in August 1793 French civil commissioners Léger-Félicité Sonthonax (1763–1813) and Étienne Polverel (1740–1795) decreed general emancipation in Saint-Domingue. Polverel and Sonthonax, who appear as heroic characters in Stella, had hoped that emancipating the enslaved population would bring them to side with France against invading British forces. On February 4, 1794, the republican National Assembly abolished slavery in France and its colonies, making the previous decree by Polverel and Sonthonax official, and securing republican France’s commitment to universal equality. Nevertheless, intermittent fighting continued between formerly enslaved, gens de couleur, French, British, and Spanish forces on the island. Sonthonax was recalled to France in 1796, a specific historical moment detailed and lamented in Stella.
In 1797, Toussaint Louverture took charge of the French forces in Saint-Domingue. In order to control the population of former slaves and to stimulate the country’s agricultural output, he instituted the dreaded Rural Code in 1800. According to this legislation, the military forced former slaves to work on plantations—not as slaves but as cultivateurs (sharecroppers)—or face severe penalties. Bergeaud harshly criticizes this law in Stella, referring to it as “slavery in all but name.”29 In 1801, Louverture created a constitution for the colony in which he named himself governor-for-life. Bergeaud criticizes this move in his novel as a “direct attack on the sovereignty of France.” Displeased with the growing power of Louverture and the other “black generals” in 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) sent a French military expedition to Saint-Domingue led by his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc (1772–1802), to restore a white colonial government to the island. In the meantime, Napoleon had overturned the abolition of slavery and, as Bergeaud laments, succeeded in reestablishing the institution in Guadeloupe. Leclerc was in charge of over forty thousand men; the expedition that bore his name was the largest French military mission sent such a distance from Europe.30 In Stella, Bergeaud describes the attack of the expeditionary forces against Saint-Domingue as that of “an unnatural mother who desires the destruction of her child.” In May 1802, French troops captured Louverture, and he and his family were sent to France. There the famous general died in a dungeon near the Swiss border, a secret prisoner of the state.
Stella’s account of this period of the Revolution involves describing divisions between the brothers initiated by the machinations of the evil Colonist. Eventually Stella and a figure known as the “Spirit of the Nation” convince Romulus and Remus that they can succeed in their mission only once they are reunited. After a long struggle, the brothers and their united force of Indigènes are victorious over the French, and they proclaim the birth of an independent Republic of Haiti. Indeed, after Louverture’s ouster, the black and gens de couleur forces—led by Dessalines and Christophe on the one hand, and Rigaud and Pétion on the other—combined to form the Army of the Indigènes, or the Indigenous Army.31 Dessalines and Rigaud led this united force against the invading troops from France, and, at the Battle of Vertières on November 18, 1803, the Indigènes prevailed against the French. Dessalines proclaimed independence on January 1, 1804.
Under the Old Regime
Although Stella’s story of the two founders of Haiti ends with the establishment of their new nation on January 1, 1804, its final chapter refers to the long history of colonization in the area and thereby places the novel and its subject within the wider context of Atlantic