Who Was the Black Woman Napoleon Couldn’t Stop?
Live Free or Die
Your white dress is damp from the heat of bodies. A force pushes toward the middle of the circle. People scream and whistle. Drums beat loud in your skull. Your soul is pushed to the edges of your being.
Walls of fire. Machetes gleam under the flames. It’s going to end one way or the other.
Your eyes roll back. Your blood races through your veins. You have a message. Two words. Vengeance and liberation.
You are the woman who started the Black revolution. You are the force of your generation and all that will follow.
Your name is Cécile Fatiman.
Break a People but Not Their Spirit
Before Haiti was born, Saint-Domingue was the most profitable French colony. On its own, it produced around 40% of the world’s sugar. It made the British and Spanish red with jealousy, and France couldn’t get enough of it. To maintain this level of production, brutal conditions were enforced. A death sentence was a peace offering compared to a life of forced labor in Saint-Domingue.
Despite endless punishment, the people still fought back and rebelled throughout nearly 300 years of slavery on the island. All those attempts were contained.
Until you, Cécile Fatiman, stepped in and engorged a spirit of revenge and freedom into your people. It is then your people who will not only fight for their own freedom, but also for everyone else’s. To make sure no body on earth, whether Black or white, would be legally made a slave again. You are indeed one kind of a woman.
Not So Human Human Rights
The Haitian Revolution started in 1791 after the ceremony held at Bois Caïman, mixing political agency and spiritual momentum. If you’ve ever heard a French official speak, you know how proud we French are of the French Revolution. 1789, chopping off the head of the king like we don’t fear shit. Defining human rights and still speaking of it today like we knew what it meant.
If you noticed the timeline, despite French so-called human rights in 1789, you, Cécile Fatiman, still had to be a vessel for Black people’s freedom in 1791.
We said human rights were for humans. Who said you were one?
If we dig down to the legal definition of what you were in the Code Noir, it basically says furniture. You had as many rights as my coffee table. Let that sink in.
Thankfully, French audacity didn’t stop you nor your people. You kept fighting.
Royalist colonists threatened to give the city of Port-au-Prince to the English to keep slavery going. Despite all the grand discourse about freedom and unity, the only reason the French Republic sided with you is because your people’s labor was so profitable they’d rather free you, pay you low wages, and give you a fake sense of agency than lose you to the British.
Ugh, the British.
Certainly France couldn’t lose face to a country still keeping a monarch at its head.
I mean, we were enlightened.
So enlightened that we brought back slavery in 1802.
Napoléon couldn’t stand Saint-Domingue’s arrogance, acting like they were equals, and the emperor needed funds for his campaigns. So much for taking pride in being a progressive country that abolished slavery in 1794, when Americans only got the memo in 1865.
It took two more years, and the elements sided with you. Yellow fever decimated the French army.
In 1804, Saint-Domingue named itself Haiti and became the first Black republic.
Why Does This Feel So Familiar?
France’s national motto is “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”. It means “Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood.” We wrote it into our constitution in 1848.
You could tell me slavery was abolished by then, so we really meant it. And I’d say you’re cute, and you probably still believe in fairytales.
You know this feeling when you read a good revenge story, but it always ends on a bitter note? Yep. Exactly that.
We boarded ships in 1825 and threatened to invade Haiti again if they didn’t pay back the money they owed us.
What money?
Aren’t you a cute little pie? The money they owed us for stealing their own bodies from us. Remember, 40% of the world’s sugar production. How are we supposed to sell macarons now?
The debt was a gruesome 150 million francs, sixteen times Haiti’s GDP in 1826.
You ever wondered how a people who had the nerve to free themselves and everybody else still ended up as one of the poorest countries in the world? Now you have the answer.
Our motto will only be valid the day Haiti gets reparations.
History rarely gave justice to Black people.
We need to create our own narrative.
That’s why I write Black France Renaissance, a series of historical fictions centering Black characters in 18th-century France.
My work in progress, The Mistress of Nantes, will be the first opus.
This framing is devastating in the best way, using the Code Noir's literal definition to show how France's enlightement rhetoric never included the people making them wealthy. The debt timeline is somethin most people skip over when they talk about Haiti's poverty, like somehow 150 million francs just evaporated without consequence. I remeber reading about how the French justified the payment as compensation for 'lost property' and thinking how dystopian it was that human beings had an invoice attached to their freedom. The Bois Caiman ceremony deserves way more attention as a foundational moment in global abolitionism.