Thomas Madiou (Port-au-Prince 1815-1884). 

Histoire d’Haiti.

Port-au-Prince, Imprimerie de Joseph Courtois, 1847-1848.

€5.500

3 volumes. 8°. [2], VIII, 370; 447, [1 blank]; 508, [2] pp. (complete incl. errata).

With woodcut national emblem of Haiti on title pages: “Independence. Liberté. Progrès. Nationale.”

Later half calf with marbled sides.

Inscribed on first title-page by the author.

Very rare first edition of a completely Haitian production, printed in Port-au-Prince. It is considered “La meilleure histoire de la periode de l’independence d’Haïti” (see Chadenat) and one of the most important Haitian books in general. Publisher Joseph Courtois (1785-1877) was a free person of colour, “mulattoe” or in French legal terms “affranchi”. His brother was Haitian revolutionary Sévère Courtois. They came from one of the few wealthy land owning Black families and Joseph was educated in Paris along with other children of the Haitian Black elite until Napoleon put an end to the “advances” of people of colour in France and Joseph moved back to Saint-Domingue. After the revolution he devoted himself to the development of education in Haiti. Together with his wife Juliette Bussière Laforest-Courtois they established the first school for girls in the young country and they managed the newspaper La Feuille du Commerce. He was imprisoned multiple times for defamation, leaving Juliette to manage the newspaper by herself. Shortly after publishing the present Histoire d’Haiti he had to flee Haiti because mulattoes were purged from the government under general Faustin Soulouque. In 1859 he could return again and he died on the island at age 92.
The 3 volumes present a history of Haiti from 1492 to 1807, though the emphasis is on the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804. Madiou, a native Haitian, importantly provided the first history of the liberation as seen from a Haitian point of view, which he derived from the collected oral transmission of recollections by contemporary statesmen and survivors of the war of independence. This set Madiou apart from the works of European historians and of his competitor Beaubrun Ardouin, also a Haitian historian. Madiou notably presented the Haitian revolution as a justified rebellion against the terrible oppression of slavery. It resulted in the book becoming "one of the masterpieces of historiography, not only Haitian but Antillean, and even of historiography in the French language of the 19th century” (see Adélaïde-Merlande).
At the end of volume III a number of important historic texts are included: the 1685 Code Noir, the Proclamation de la liberte generale by Sonthonax of 1793, the 1801 Constitution de Saint-Domingue by Toussaint-Louverture, the Constitution d'Haiti of 1805 and, at the end of each volume, an index of the names mentioned in this collection. The racial segregation is very obvious in this register because it adds to every name the skin colour: blanc, noir or homme/femme de couleur. In 1904 a sequel appeared, covering the years 1843-1846. This was published by the progeny of Thomas Madiou, supposedly based on his manuscripts.

Condition: Foxed throughout, but only some parts more extensively. Repairs to the first three leaves of volume 3.

Loose printed ex-libris of Denys Comar (1937-2021) inserted.

Reference: Chadenat 362; Le Clerc, Biblioth. Americana, 4838, pp. 641; Sabin 43704; Scheler, Voyages-Marine, 552.

Literature:

Adélaïde-Merlande, Jacques. La Caraïbe et la Guyane au temps de la Révolution et de l'Empire, 1789-1804. Paris, 1992.

Mongey, Vanessa. “A Tale of Two Brothers: Haiti’s Other Revolutions.” In: The Americas, vol. 69, no. 1, 2012, pp. 37–60.

Nicholls, David. “A Work of Combat: Mulatto Historians and the Haitian Past, 1847-1867.” In: Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, vol. 16, no. 1, 1974, pp. 15–38.