There are not so many primary sources regarding the massacres of the French whites that took place in the early months of 1804 after the departure of the French troops. The main ones (notably Chazotte, Thoret, and Palaiseau) have been cited and presented critically by Jeremy Popkin (2007, 2016). But then, as notes Popkin, the historiography of the 1804 massacres remains relatively poor, basically a footnote to the general history of the Haitian Revolution. What is known still relies by far and large on the work of Haitian historians Thomas Madiou (Histoire d’Haïti, 3, 1848) and Beaubrun Ardouin (Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, 6, 1856).
Madiou, the "father of Haitian history" (Geggus, 2002), had access not only to archives that were still extant in the 1840s, but he was well-connected and knew personally participants to the Revolution. Madiou and Ardouin's narrative of the 1804 massacres have not been (much) challenged so far, and all histories of Haiti include a version of it, though sometimes in a very shortened way, like in C.R. James' Black Jacobins, 1938. This is not a comfortable topic.
1. Narrative
On 1st January 1804, in Les Gonaïves, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, before reading the Act of Independence to the crowd assembled there, read a proclamation that called for the murder of all French people left in Haiti.
[Soldiers,] you will have done nothing if you do not give to all nations a terrible, but just example of the vengeance that must be exacted by a people proud to have found freedom again, and eager to preserve it. Let us frighten all those who would dare to steal our freedom; let us start with the French! May they shudder when they approach our coastline, either because they remember all the exactions they committed, or because of our horrifying pledge to kill every Frenchman who soils the land of freedom with his sacrilegious presence.
This contradicted a previous proclamation by Dessalines, Clairvaux and Christophe, from 29 November 1803, which apologized for the death of innocent whites and promised that white plantation owners would be able to return (Popkin, 2016). This may have lulled the few remaining whites - former plantation owners like Chazotte, but also traders and craftsmen like Thoret, or white members of the armée indigène that had fought against the French - in a false sense of security. Whether this was a trap or whether the later massacres reflected a change in policy is still debated (Geggus, 2016).
At the end of January 1804, Dessalines went on a tour of Haiti, first going to the South, coming back to the West, "a long trail of blood behind him" (Madiou, 1848), and then going North before returning to Port-au-Prince on 22 April. During those three months, in each town visited by Dessalines, whites were rounded up and executed, sometimes in his presence, with Dessalines choosing who would live or die. At first only the men were killed, but in the last days it was decided to kill women and children. The massacres only targeted French whites, and spared Poles, Germans, and other European nationalities. A few French were spared too when they were found useful by Dessalines: doctors, surgeons, pharmacists, and craftsmen - shoemakers, hatmakers, printers, or a tailor like Norbert Thoret, who worked directly for Dessalines until he escaped to San Domingo with his family.
Many French whites were saved by other Europeans and by Haitians. There's a general consensus - again going back to Madiou - that part of the population were appalled by the killing order, refused to participate in it, and in many cases rescued people. Dessalines' own wife Marie-Claire is credited with saving whites, disobeying her husband. Other high-ranking officers, including generals Pétion and Geffrard, hid whites and found ways to exfiltrate them and have them transfered safely to Cuba and elsewhere. Chazotte owed his life to his personal relations with Geffrard, who protected him during the massacre in Jeremie on 9-24 March 1804 by declaring him to be an American merchant. One Haitian officer, Colonel Gaston, after being ordered to kill whites in Jeremie, shot himself on the balcony of his own house, telling the crowd below that he would "rather die by [his] own hand than be concerned in, or be guilty of any murder."
On 28 April 1804, another proclamation of Dessalines ended the massacres:
Like an overflowing torrent which roars, tears away, sweeps along, your vengeful fury has carried away everything in its path [...] Where is there a vile Haitian, unworthy of his regeneration, who doesn’t think he fulfilled the eternal decrees in exterminating these blood-crazed tigers [...] Yes, we have given these real cannibals war for war, crimes for crimes, outrages for outrages. Yes, I have saved my country, I have avenged America.
The details of the killings themselves and their chronology are less known, due to the fact that many archives consulted by Madiou have long disappeared. Some important data, like the exact number of victims and survivors, will never be known - it is somewhere in the few thousands. As far as historical mass killings go, it was relatively small, of the same order of magnitude as the "Drownings at Nantes" that had taken place in France between November 1793 and February 1794. C.R. James could write that "no holocaust took place".
The testimonies, some published decades after the facts, contain discrepancies in terms of numbers and chronology, as can be expected. However, they describe sequences of events "familiar from the literature of modern genocides": the round-up of astonished and increasingly terrified victims, their pleas and bribes for forgiveness, and the often "carnivalesque" behaviour of the killers (Popkin, 2007). Chazotte's pages on the Jeremie massacre of 9-14 March 1804 (which can be corroborated with the testimony of a British captain John Perkins of the HMS Tartar) have the nightmarish quality of a slow-motion crash.
It was half past nine and in the silence of the night, when four hundred wretched innocent white men who, on this afternoon, had given up all they possessed to save their lives, now stripped of all their clothes, their arms fastened behind their backs, and tied two by two with cords, headed by black sapeurs, with large axes on their shoulders, and accompanied by a black regiment with bayonets and swords in their hands, were seen marching, or, to speak more properly, were seen dragged along, through the place, lighted by numerous torches.
Testimonies published in the Atlantic press in the weeks following the massacres were derived from those of captains like Perkins and French refugees. They were, by nature, less "literary" than the memoirs written years later, and they tended to emphazise the most grotesque and gruesome nature of the killings (Gaffield, 2012), notably the killings of women and children. Here is an American account published in the Virginia Argus of 9 June 1804, and another version published in Britain in the Gloucester Journal on 23 July.
The story reported by Nantes trader Alexis Bonamy, which first appeared in the Journal des débats of 11 August 1804 and was later translated in English, tells of the fate of a French merchant named La Caussade, who had invited Dessalines and forty Haitian officers in his home in Cap Français to ingratiate himself with the new authorities. This is supposed to have happened 5 days after Dessalines' proclamation of 28 April.
The dinner was sumptuous with noisy gaiety, and ended with Champagne wine, which was drunk to the health of General Dessalines, carried by M. la Caussade, to that of the Haitian people, etc. The general in his turn, and with liquor, toasted his host; this was the signal. The two neighbours of M. la Caussade immediately seized him, one by the chest and the other by the thigh, took him off and laid him on the table. There each of the guests takes his knife and thrusts it into the body of the unfortunate man. The cannibals compete, according to the proclamation, for the honour of striking first. From the house of M. la Caussade [Lacaussade] they went to the house of M. Folen [Follin], a merchant, asked him for liquor, drank it, and murdered him; then to the house of M. Arnaud; then to the house of another white man, whose arms and legs they cut off, leaving the trunk to exist for as long as nature could support it; from there to the house of M. Hardivilliers, a partner in the house of Foache, etc. etc. The cry of death spreads and is carried to all the houses. [...] I had in that city a stepsister, her nursing daughter, other parents... none has survived.
The deaths of Follin, Arnaud and Hardivilliers are reported in the private letters of Hardivilliers's business partner, Stanislas Foäche (published in Demeaux, 1951). Bonamy's narrative continues with the murders at the Georges household: the stabbing of the three Georges daughters by Dessalines's soldiers, followed by the hanging of their mother after she was forced by the monsters to see the bodies of her daughters. A version of this story (Histoire de Mesdemoiselles de Saint-Janvier, 1812, see Popkin 2010 for comments) tells how two little girls of the Saint-Janvier household, Georges' neighbours, were protected by Haitian General Diaquoi. He could not save their mother (who was decapitated; in that version, Mrs Georges was hung by her feet, not by her neck), but managed to hide the girls in his home with his wife Judith until the death of Dessalines in 1806. Mrs Dessalines paid for their travel to New York in 1809 (in that story, all the Blacks except Dessalines himself are good and brave people). While the Georges story is a little "edifying", several of the details can be corroborated.
> 2. Perception