Reading A Thatcherite - Napoleon Bonaparte

Huh. This doesn't look like Merryl Streep.

I have on hand Napoleon: A Life (English publication title, Napoleon The Great) by Andrew Roberts (2014).

This isn't the first biography or study of Napoleon I've taken on by any means.  But it is the first one to be published since the massive publication of all of Napoleon's correspondence; the past editions left out a third of the letters for various political or axe-grinding reasons. It is also the first work on Napoleon written by a self-proclaimed Thatcherite.  On his wiki and other sites, Robert refrains from mentioning any other reason for his conversion to Thatcherism other than he agreed that the UK had no reason to join the European Union and / or change it's own currency.  From early in his adult life he has always been deeply embedded in the UK's upper echelons of the business and financial communities -- he's currently married to the CEO of "the Brunswick Group LLP and a Governor of the South Bank Centre." 

Roberts is a prolific and most successful historian - journalist.  For all his publications and many honors and dignities received, including several BBC programs made from his books go his wiki here.  

There's a lot here to make me skeptical about his work.  On the other hand, he has a deep and authentic knowledge about the man and the era via his previous works, all of which are mostly well received.

As far as this bio of Napoleon, the reviews are mixed.  Several have mentioned that Roberts has allowed his hero-worship of the man spoil his interpretation and perceptions.  For my own most important concerns around Napoleon, which is slavery, the slave trace, the Saint-Domingue slave uprising, Toussaint, the Caribbean wars with Britain, the sale of the Louisiana Territory, and the earlier accompanying matters of the Revolution's and Directory's relationships with and treatment of the very young United States -- there's hardly anything. This isn't unusual in studies of Napoleon, particularly those by British writers.  They got their own ass kicking in Saint-Domingue and don't like thinking about that much.  They also overplayed their hand with the U.S. in this era, which led to the War of 1812, which wasn't good for Britain in the end.  And most of all the Brit historians lurve Rear-Admiral Nelson, Trafalgar, the Peninsular War and Waterloo. So there ya go -- no Saint-Domingue or Louisiana or the U.S.

But this sort of thing reminds us how basic it is to research to read only a single work by a single writer, and that we need to read many works by many writers from different political and social perspectives -- and from different eras.

I don't think there's need to question Roberts on the facts of the matters -- it's all about the spins he gives them.  So I like to compare and contrast.

I do respect and profoundly admire what Roberts has accomplished in his life's works.  There are thousands and thousands of works on Napoleon alone, many published even when he was alive -- and he's read enormous numbers of them. His french must be perfection, which I envy!  I also envy him his resources: he's personally visited, in company of experts, over 50 of the 63 battle grounds where Napoleon personally commanded.

Re-reading C.L.R. James

The lines that impress today come from C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins:Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, second edition, revised, 1963 -- originally published 1938.

p. 78 --

"The rich are only defeated when running for their lives."

Something else I've encountered upon this re-reading of The Black Jacobins: this is the only work of history in which there is not a jot of sympathy for the fate of King Louis XVI.

James also observes, which no else has either, that the organization of the plantation sugar slaves for both field and factory work on San Domingo was closer to that of the Russian proletariat than any other group of laborers at that time.  This made for a mass uprising, as in Russia.  He says on p.85:

"The slaves worked on the land, and, like revolutionary peasants everywhere, they aimed at the extermination of their oppressors."

Historians don't write sentences like these any more.  But who knows, that they may again someday?

Toussaint L'Ouverture

Even more impressive to me, was how he opens this chapter quoting the war song of the San Domingo slaves throwing off, literally, their chains:

Eh!! Eh ! Bomba! Heu! Heu!

Canga, bafio té!

Canga, mouné de lé!

Canga, do ki la!

Canga, do ki la!

Canga, li!

What I did not know the last time I read The Black Jacobins is the legacy of this war song of the San Domingo slave revolution remains embedded in the culture of many places in the Caribbean to where a variety of San Domingueans and later, Haitian, immigrated.  We began to learn of this and understand it via our Puerto Rican amigo, Alex LaSalle (note, name is "french"), whose family's oral culture always said his ancestors were brought to Puerto Rico by a mulatto master fleeing the wars, who brought a female slave concubine and their children with him.  His grandmother was still singing this song to him and other children when they were babies.

From a demonstration / workshop / performance gig of Alma deMoyo in Connecticut.

As well, one of the national dances of Puerto Rico is the Bomba, along with the Plena, both of them contra danses, but at least one of them done to this war song, as the drums thunder out its rhythms.  There are traditional costumes that go with these dances at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, for Baryshnikov and an audience filled with African American and Caribbean heads, of all skin tones and diversity.  

El V and Alex have taught classes around this war song, bringing in the drums and dancers, including a performance plus presentation in New Orleans Congo Square.

These are the sorts of communications out of the past that make my breath come fast and my heartbeat speed up, because they are -- well so wonderful. The Black Jacobins is from the past before I was born.  It is also part of my own reading - research past, going back to the first time before I knew enough to get the benefit from it, to another time when I got a great deal, to now, when I am receiving even more.  The times are so different now from when I first read the book, it's as if that first reading may as well have taken place in another world.

These little bits that are transmitted still via family and culture, and which are personal to people I know, about something I'd seen myself, but upon first encountering, knew nothing.  And this way, I too, in a minute manner, am a part of the transmittal of historical memory.

A Napoleonic Triumverate

That all three of the books with which I'm engaged this week feature Napoleón is accidental, not intentional, but I do enjoy such serendipitous occurrance.

The "recreational" book I'm reading is In These Times: Living In Britain Through Napoleon's Wars 1793 - 1815 (2014) by Jenny Uglow. This book is rather disappointing. I was expecting more content rather than unattached, unconnected extended anecdote (this criticism is also leveled by British history reviewers too, I see). Extended as these anecdotes are though, they frequently leave out what

British view of the XYZ Affair, notorious in the U.S., which here is portrayed as female. The line below reads: "Property Protected a la Francoise."

the reader needs to know. I expected learn specifics about the banking and financing of this era, which includes a British banker pulling the financing together for the U.S., for the Louisiana Purchase. But this momentous event gets a couple of words at most -- and those words are unattached to anything -- in fact one would have to use cogitation to understand the man she mentions is a banker -- and I never learn the name of his bank. I also hoped to learn much more about what it cost Britain to blockade the U.S. shipping not only to their own markets but everyone else's.

The audio book I'm working out with is Napoleon's Wars: An International History (2007) by Charles J. Esdaile. The focus isn't so much on the man and certainly not on his love affairs (yay), but on the why of the many wars he fought, and how they were won or lost and the consequences of the occurrence, the winning and / or losing, on the larger stage of Europe. Among the useful elements the author stresses is that it wasn't until the second coming of Napoleón during the Congress of Vienna in 1814 that all of Europe and Britain and were united against France. This was the only time during this entire era of warfare that happened. I hadn't quite realized that before.

The first edition (1938), from Secker & Warburg

The current research book is a re-read, for the third time: The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), by Trinidadian scholar, C.L.R. James (1901 - 1989) which is about the French Revolution, Napoleon, England and the Haitian Revolution. The Black Jacobins is the seminal book on Haiti and the Haitian Revolution. Before this book, Haiti and its Revolution had fairly been written out of the history of the French Revolution and Napoleón's Empire. After this book it was no longer possible to discuss either of them without including Haiti and its Revolution. Or, to quote James from his own book, regarding the Haitian slave owners' claim to representational seats in the 1788 Estates-General:

. . . . Full of confidence these slave owners claimed 18 seats, but Mirabeau turned fiercely on them:  "You claim representation preportionate to the enumber of the inhabitants.  The free blacks are proprietors and tax-payers, and yet they have not been allowed to vote.  And as for the slaves, either they are men or they are not; if the colonists consider them to be men, let them free them and make them electors and eligible for seats; if the contrary is the case, have we, in apportioning deputies according to the population of France, taken into consideration the number of our horses and mules?"

In other words the Big Whites, the white slave owning class of San Domingo (as James refers to it, writer in English as he is), claimed population proportional representation for themselves in the Estates-General based on the number of slaves they owned (just as in the U.S. Constitution for the antebellum southern slave owning elite)  -- while denying other property owners seats in the Estates-General because they were "small whites," i.e. didn't own land and slaves, the rapidly growing class of mulattoes, whose wealth in cash, land and slaves was rapidly increasing, and the "black" free people, who were not wealthy and owned no land or slaves.

The upshot was that the San Domingo Big White slave owners were allowed only 6 deputies, while:

" . . . the great Liberal orator [Mirabeau] had places the case of the Friends other Negro squarely before the whole of France in unforgettable words.  The San Domingo representatives realized at last what they had done; They had tied the fortunes of San Domingo to the assembly of a people in revolution and thenceforth the history of liberty in France and of slave emancipation in San Domingo is one and indivisible."

Alas, such attitude lasted for a very short time, as emancipation was not to the taste of those who initially played such a role in France in making the Revolution, the great property owner class, referred to as the Great Bourgeoisie  and particularly the Maritime Bourgeoisie, whose entire fortunes were tied to every aspect of slavery in San Domingue.

This time around understand more clearly I had previously James's assertions that PM Pitt's demand to abolish the European African slave trade was high hypocrisy. By the time of the French Revolution, San Domingue was the most wealth-producing territory on the globe, financing almost all of France with its production of sugar, coffee, cotton and indigo, and the related industries including the slave trade. However, at this time as well, England's India colonies were beginning to be successful producing sugar and cotton, and the workers needed to be paid only a penny a day. San Domingue demanded more African slaves every year to put more of the island into cultivation -- devouring the captives' lives in less than ten years, from overwork, disease, starvation and abuse. By 1789 San Domingue was importing at least 40,000 Africans annually. Pitt's desire to abolish the European African trade was straight up protectionism for English products -- his definition of Adam Smith's "free market" meant eliminating the competition. Previously this had sailed right past me.

This latter, btw, is the book anyone must read before even thinking s/he's going to write anything about San Domingue, Haiti (especially if s/he's never been to Haiti, the Caribbean and doesn't know anyone from these parts of the world) or the French Revolution, whether journalism, history, literary fiction, genre fiction -- anything. For if s/he hasn't read this book s/he is going to make a huge fool of her/himself. This time around I'm reading the second edition (1963), to which James appended his seminal essay, "From Toussaint L'Overture to Fidel Castro."

Is it necessary to add that James was a Marxist in his politics and in his historical perspective? This is why U.S. history departments in the 50's and 60's didn't want him on the syllabus.

Would that all of our books would remain so foundational, so seminal, so necessary, 80 + years after initial publication as The Black Jacobins has.

Hmmm. The library says that Ancillary Sword is ready for pick-up. Will the pages of this novel contain as much excitement as the matters of these books, even though the events -- though not their consequences and effects -- took place so very long ago?. .

After the Quake: Music, Politics, and Spirituality in Haiti

The final program in el V's HipDeep series that investigates the historical, political, cultural and spiritual elements in Angola - old Kongo, and the diaspora into the New World has been created.

This program focues on San Domingue in the past, and Haiti, as it was called, after the slave revolution.  Though program is centered after the terrible earthquake, it is not about the quake or rebuilding, particularly.  It's a wild, high velocity, high energy, fast moving show dealing with vodou and the music and culture, and how these both bleed into the political situation and are repressed by it. Among other things you will learn what a real zombie is, what it signifies. You can hear it here.

For this exclusive Afropop Worldwide Hip Deep report, producer Ned Sublette travels to Port-au-Prince, where he checks in with bandleader Richard Morse of RAM, and with Lolo and Manzé Beaubrun of Boukman Eksperyans, both of whom produced hotly controversial carnival songs this year. In a country where the president, Michel Martelly, was formerly the Tags – 1 dance-music singer, the complexities of politics are felt in music. We'll look at how vodou and carnival interact to provide a vocabulary for political expression in the tense post-quake atmosphere. We’ll meet 95-year-old Emerante de Pradines Morse, who was the first singer to perform the songs of vodou as entertainment in Port-au-Prince; we’ll hear from historian Laurent Dubois, author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History; and we’ll go crowd-surfing in the crush of carnival at Jakmel, the southern Haitian port city that was once a colonial cousin to New Orleans. Produced with support from a Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion, a program of the University of Southern California's Knight Chair in Media and Religion.

This is long series in every way: long dreamed of;  long envisioned, long struggled to make possible; long in creation.  And here it is, fulled realized, created, and concluded!

Congratulations Mr. Sublette!