CNCS Manuscript Workshop with PD Dr. Friedemann Pestel

The Second Haitian Revolution and the Making of a Global Revolutionary South: The Downfall of the Haitian Monarchy, the Annexation of Santo Domingo, and Emancipatory Geopolitics, 1820-1825

One of the peculiar features of the Age of Revolutions is that many revolutionary experiences across the Atlantic world culminated not in republican consolidation but in the restoration of monarchical orders—not only in France and its sister republics, but also in Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Brazil. Even the Haitian Revolution, often regarded as the most radical of these upheavals and as the foundation of the world’s first postcolonial, anti-slavery state, ultimately produced monarchical regimes: first the Haitian Empire under the Black general Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1804–6), and soon thereafter the Kingdom of Haiti under Henry Christophe (1811–20). In the context of the Napoleonic Wars and the attempted pacification of the Atlantic world through the peace settlements of 1814–15, the postcolonial Haitian monarchy understood itself as a forerunner of Europe’s restored monarchies—and colonial powers. From this perspective, political restoration was an Atlantic-wide challenge in which Haiti claimed an integral place.

The downfall of the Kingdom of Haiti in 1820, precipitated by a military revolt, has conventionally been explained by historians as the collapse of a political “anomaly” driven by internal Haitian antagonisms. For contemporaries across the Atlantic world, however, the regime change was widely perceived as a new “revolution.” This article examines how European commentators in France, Britain, Germany, and Spain came to see the end of the Haitian monarchy in 1820 as the defining moment that rendered a “Haitian Revolution” legible—something largely unthinkable before—while foregrounding the agency of both the Haitian king and his opponents. These interpretations were shaped by ongoing revolutionary movements in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Latin America, as well as by contemporary experiences of political violence and social unrest in France, Britain, and the German states. Building on recent scholarship that conceptualises these Mediterranean and imperial revolutions as steps toward a “global revolutionary South” (Maurizio Isabella), this article argues for re-centering Haiti as a focal point in understanding what made the Atlantic world revolutionary once again around 1820.