1 - Toussaint Louverture, “Spin Doctor”? Launching the Haitian Revolution in the Media Sphere

Summary

Il promettait de jetter le voile de l'oubli sur les événements qui ont eu lieu à Saint-Domingue

(It threatened to drape a veil of amnesia over the events that had transpired in Saint-Domingue)

Toussaint Louverture, letter to Napoleon Bonaparte from on board the Hero en route to captivity in France

Media and Philosophical Mediation between the Worlds of Masters and Slaves

Hegel's dialectic of master and slave was deeply informed, according to Susan Buck-Morss in “Hegel and Haiti,” by the philosopher's reading of news stories about the upheavals in Saint-Domingue during his time in Jena. To make this case, Buck-Morss examined the unusually extensive media coverage of Saint-Domingue in Minerva, a newspaper important to Hegel's world outlook, which published between 1804 and 1805 “a continuing series, totaling more than a hundred pages, including source documents, news summaries, and eyewitness accounts.” With the hindsight provided by Buck-Morss's research, it seems inevitable that Hegel's profoundly influential paradigm would have emerged in dialogue with the representation of the slave revolution in Saint-Domingue. Buck-Morss's compelling analysis of the diffusion and reception of information about Haiti in the German media raises fascinating questions about the intellectual reception of the Haitian Revolution in other countries, especially France. Yet the significance of the reception of news of the Revolution cannot be properly understood without considering the more fundamental question of how news was produced within and exported from Saint-Domingue during the Revolution, and what roles the ex-slaves played in disseminating their political demands and interpretations of events.