Description
This book tells the story of the Battle of Vertières, fought in 1803 between indigenous Haitian forces under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and a French expeditionary army commanded by Napoleon. The battle marked the culmination of a thirteen-year revolutionary struggle to end slavery and the dawn of an independent Haiti. Yet despite its pivotal importance to the history of Haiti, France, and the Americas, the Battle of Vertières has been struck from the record. The Cry of Vertières is the first book-length study of the battle, drawing from an array of sources including military correspondence, Haitian literature, art, and popular music. The event itself is recounted in vivid detail: it is a dramatic story of a volunteer army of former slaves, seeking the promises of freedom and citizenship held out by the revolution, defeating a colonial power determined to re-enslave them. The book also examines why the history of the battle has been suppressed in France - an act of erasure of a humiliating defeat - and why it remains fragile even in Haiti. Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec explains that today Vertières is both a key lieu de mémoire that embodies reconciliation, pride, and strength for the Haitian people, and a figure of speech exploited by politicians to reinforce their power. Describing a decisive yet largely forgotten moment in the revolutionary history of the Americas, The Cry of Vertières makes an essential contribution to the complex subjects of race, memory, colonialism, and cultural nationalism in present-day France and Haiti.
About the authors
Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, professor of history at the Université de Sherbrooke, is the co-director of the digital project Marronnage in the Atlantic World: Sources and Life Trajectories.
Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec's profile page
JONATHAN KAPLANSKY won a French Voices Award to translate Nobel Prize winning author Annie Ernaux’s La vie extérieure (Things Seen). His translation of Frank Borzage: The Life and Films of a Hollywood Romantic by Hervé Dumont was a finalist for the Wall Award from the Theatre Library Association. Recent translations include Jonathan Bécotte’s Like a Hurricane, Hélène Rioux’s The End of the World is Elsewhere, and the libretto of an opera by Hélène Dorion and Marie-Claire Blais entitled Yourcenar: An Island of Passions. He has also translated Dorion’s Days of Sand. Born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Kaplansky now lives in Montreal.
Editorial Reviews
"The Cry of Vertières makes a major and much welcomed contribution to the expanding field of Haitian revolutionary studies. By focusing on the centrality of the decisive Battle of Vertières, both in the historical record and from the perspective of collective memory 'from below' in Haiti's war of national liberation, it reconstructs -- in a more meaningful way than any strict military account -- the definitive turning point in Haiti's transition from a French colony at the brink of being re-enslaved to an independent country governed by former slaves." Carolyn Fick, Concordia University and author of The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below
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Not Even the Sound of a River
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The Cry of Vertières
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Quest Biographies Bundle — Books 11–20
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Canadian Adventurers and Explorers Bundle
David Thompson / Vilhjalmur Stefansson / Samuel de Champlain / John Franklin / George Simpson / Phyllis Munday