Toussaint Louverture, “Spin Doctor”? Launching the Haitian Revolution in the Media Sphere
Toussaint Louverture, “Spin Doctor”? Launching the Haitian Revolution in the Media Sphere
In ‘Hegel and Haiti’, Susan Buck-Morss argued that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's dialectic of master and slave was considerably informed by his reading of news stories about the slave revolution in Saint-Domingue during his time in Jena. This chapter examines the Haitian Revolution as public relations, focusing on how Toussaint Louverture entered the media sphere and the French reception of Haitian correspondence and proclamations. It discusses the ‘politics’ of a decolonisation discourse articulated in French, Toussaint's legacies primarily in texts in the Ancien moniteur and the Gazette de France between 1797 and 1802, and his use of French rather than Creole. The chapter also shows how Toussaint established a field of sympathy in order to navigate around the racism inherent to the metropolitan tolerance of colonialism and slavery, and concludes by looking at Léger Félicité Sonthonax's access to the press after his return to France.
Keywords: Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture, public relations, correspondence, sympathy, Léger Félicité Sonthonax, media, Creole
Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
