La Perle
Ou ; mémoires d'un voyage
à la recherche d'un pays perdu,
en réponse aux hommes de lettres infernals,
dont les réclamations ont mis en désordre
l'équilibre des forces naturel.
La Perle is a volume of the collected writings of French man of letters Alexandre Cazal, produced during his stay in Haiti between 1817 and 1819, and first published unabridged in August 1819. Following the publication of his previous book, the novel Aporie, Cazal travelled to Saint-Domingue in September 1817, motivated in part by a desire to escape some of the notoriety Aporie had brought him. Although intended to present the natural condition of the gens de couleur as dignified, in contrast to the various stereotypes held at the time by Europeans, be they exoticised or prejudiced, Cazal had inadvertently sparked a resumption of the debate on the on the political status of Saint-Domingue, still independent and under Black rule after its secession from France during the Revolutionary period. In the summer of 1817, Cazal was commissioned by radical liberal journal Le Constitutionnel to write a series of essays on the political situation in the former colony, at that point divided between the neo-feudal Kingdom of Haiti in the north and the ambiguously authoritarian Republic of Haiti in the south. The result was a unique insight by a sympathetic Frenchman—albeit, and perhaps more accurately, a ‘reconstructed’ man of colour—into the workings of a society still very much alien to Europeans.
Cazal stayed in Haiti for eighteen months, financed initially by Le Constitutionnel, though soon forced to live off his own means owing to the precarity of the journal's financial situation. He lived first in his birth town of Port-au-Prince, now the capital of the new Republic. Over a three-month period, he became acquainted with various members of the ruling circle of Jean-Pierre Boyer—aided, ironically, by his notoriety, which had reached the Antilles and manifested itself as a fierce admiration. Eventually meeting Boyer himself, Cazal integrated himself within Haitian high society so as to chronicle the workings of the government. The result was his first collection of essays sent back to Le Constitutionnel, serialised between January and March 1818, in which he first describes briefly, but astutely, the history of Haiti's government since the fall of Dessalines, before going on to offer an in-depth analysis of the workings of the Republic. Cazal passed comment on his disappointment in finding the Republic to be unstable and perpetually bordering on insolvency, criticising in particular the disjunct between the liberal values on which it was founded and the illberal reality caused by its penury. He also passed judgement on the regime for resorting to autocracy in the face of a troublesome legislature, adding here a cautionary discursus for the benefit of the Bourbon regime in France, which he feared could be easily tempted into doing the same. At the same time, he praised the government's ability to remain tolerant in spite of its various difficulties, drawing contrast with other historical regimes quick to scapegoat in times of trouble.
After spending time in the company of the government, Cazal left Port-au-Prince in midwinter to tour the Republic's countryside, meeting subsistence farmers and other Haitians removed from the politics of the capital. His next series of essays, serialised in France in spring 1818, largely abandoned political moralising to focus instead on the reality of ‘colonial’ life. Here, as had been preluded in Aporie, Cazal writes in a distinct humanistic voice, making no attempt to romanticise or aggrandise his subjects beyond their innate dignity as free citizens. By way of example, extracted below is a small portion of Cazal's account of a day spent helping a peasant farmer in his work on the Massif de la Hotte:
It is hot. Not since my childhood have I known such heat, permeating the very essence of my being so that, out here, removed from the relative gentility of Port-au-Prince, I feel myself equally removed from all pretensions of Europe. This is a foreign land. Its trees and its landscapes would hold no sway over the artistic sensibilities of the Parisian salon. This is a landscape that titillates the tastes of home, whose presence is active, alive—which lives, not in the way that the forests of France live as on occasion the hunt rushes through, the animals aroused to action, but constantly, through confrontation with each and every peasant who works it. Here, its life is mundane. It feeds through the modest bounty of its harvests. Its true sustaining power is felt only through the vigour inspired by its inevitable vibrancy, so ubiquitous as to become insensible, save to those attuned, as out here one must be, to its sublime power.
…
Jacques-Anne and I sit amongst its densest regions, taking shelter from the Sun by retreating from his clearing back into the forest. We lunch with no great ceremony, Jacques-Anne having picked for us both some corn and beans which we now eat, their fields still close by. Later, at dinner, our diet will be supplemented by spinach and sweet potato. During work in the afternoon, when even in January the air can hang over us at over twenty degrees Réaumur. This is only amplified by the work itself, which in the light breeze afforded to us this morning was assuaged slightly. Ordinarily, it is far from my gentle labour of writing, which now more than ever I know to be know labour at all—my hands, fragile from a leisured Parisian existence, were unprepared for the work of scything and threshing. Jacques-Anne, meanwhile, is well aware of the respect he must pay to his craft—and which I, in turn, pay to him. His hands are balmed by callouses, strong but not rough, smoothed by years in this clearing, engaged in the yearly cycle of sowing and reaping, for no reward but his own continued freedom of existence.
Having worked across the Republic's rural regions, Cazal moved in May 1818 to Milot, seat of the autocratic monarchy of Henri Christophe, self-styled Henri I. Cazal's default position on the present attempt at monarchy, Haiti's second, was contempt, viewing it as unfortunate that the desire for self-rule should lead to the desire for self-subjugation. He was also scathing of Henri's system of ‘fumage’, a revivified feudalism that bound all able-bodied men into service producing goods for the kingdom's fledgling economy. Essays from this period were eagerly received back in Paris, attracting a premium from Le Constitutionnel in June 1818 before being syndicated in Le Censeur in the autumn. French society was amused by Cazal's revelations of a society forced to institute slavery by the backdoor to ensure its won survival, with some conservative writers and politicians taking this as evidence that Haiti could not rule itself, or else that slavery or servitude was the ‘natural’ state of the Haitians. Dismayed by this reaction, Cazal produced a series of essays in the autumn in which he compares the situation in Haiti to the situation of the Ancien Regime, exposing the hypocrisy of finding Black Haitians abhorrent for instituting a feudal society, yet supporting a French monarchy that sustained a similar system until both were felled by the Revolution. Cazal therefore attacked the illiberality of Haitian society whilst emphasising such illiberality was by no means grounds for reconquest of the island, or proof that the Haitains were any less civilised than the French.
At the end of 1818, Cazal sent his final essay to Le Constitutionnel: an account of his meeting with Henri I. Henri received Cazal warmly, admiring the writer as a successful Haitian. Possibly seeing the potential for Cazal to help shore up his regime, which was by now starting to crumble, Henri made the eccentric decision to create Cazal ‘Chevalier de l'Outremer’ within his Haitian peerage, with a view to retaining him as a major court figure. Cazal, while gracious enough not to reject the king outright, never used his dubious title—save on occasion when writing feuilletons in the dailies under the pseudonym ‘Outremer’. Regardless, Cazal's account presented Henri in a light less sympathetic than empathetic. His vanity was exposed, yet not to the detriment of his love of Haitian independence. Cazal ruffled feathers by drawing comparison between the Haitian monarch and certain members of France's own peerage—vain to the point of blindness, yet, even if misguided, patriotic in their delusion.
Cazal left Milot in February 1819 and returned to Port-au-Prince, where he stopped writing essays in favour of prose and, notably, verse. Cazal's prose here manifested itself as short vignettes of Haitian life, drawing upon a range of characters inspired by people he met during his travels. They range from the satirical to the poignant—a highlight is a narrative description of Cazal's discovery that his mother, who lived in Port-au-Prince and whom he had made effort to contact whilst in Haiti, had died of yellow fever in 1816. Anticipating an idiom that would later become familiar to the readers of Flaubert, Balzac and Maupassant, Cazal's short stories from Haiti examine the foibles of a society not as alien to the French as they may have liked to believe. Although realism and humanism dominate, there are also occasions where Cazal's style is more evidently influenced by Romantic and Gothic elements, creating a sort of magical realism avant la lettre. Curiously, it was one of these stories that provided the collection with its title: “La Perle” is the disquieting account of a French merchant who, arriving in Haiti en route to the American South, becomes ‘infected’ by a spirit entity that seems to represent a sort of Voudou embodiment of the island itself. It should be noted, of course, that—as is often the case with Cazal—the title here is significant, in this case a pun: ‘La Perle’ can refer either to the island itself, the ‘Pearl of the Antilles’, or else figuratively to a bead or droplet, which Cazal animates as some sort of germ of an idea that infects all who visit.
The poetry, meanwhile, is notable by its very existence rather than for its literary merit. Whilst undoubtedly competent, Cazal's reputation will never rest securely on his verse. The book when published in 1819 treated them as something of an afterthought, resigning them to the final pages. Most are little more than vignettes—typically either Romantic expressions of Haiti's landscape, or else occasionally verses dedicated to particular characters Cazal met during his time on the island. In truth, Cazal does not fit Romanticism easily—he much better fits the opportunities for social and psychological investigation offered by his usual realistic humanism—but that is not to say his verse falls entirely flat. Some interest can be found in his structures, where he often used subtle variations of the traditional alexandrine. In this verse from “L'Homme de Lettres”, for example, a self-referential satirical response to the notoriety gained after Aporie, he abandons the conventional masculine/feminine rhyme alternation in favour of freer verse:
La désordre, entraînée
par mots irréflechis,
bien sûr, a fait ciblé
encore cette colonie.
(The disorder, caused / by ill-considered words, / of course, makes a target / yet of this colony.)
Perhaps unexpectedly, the result is an alexandrine form that tilts more than is usual towards prosody, the meter usually giving the impression of the prosaic. Elsewhere, as in this verse from “L'Isle d'Hermine”, this effect could produce a surprisingly denuded vision of Haiti's natural beauty:
Un pays de la descente
aux rives où elle termine,
d'un beau paysage qui monte
gardien de l'isle d'hermine
(A country of descent / to the shores where she ends / [and] of a natural beauty that rises / [as] guardian of the ermine isle.)
Ultimately, La Perle established further Cazal's reputation as an energetic and independent mind within the world of French literature. Whilst the verse was effectively ignored, his prose, never before published, was lauded by critics as a bold contribution to the development of a nascent French realism. Later, critics appreciated Cazal's efforts to present the common humanity between French and Haitian, praising the egalitarian nature of his authorial gaze as much as the perspicacity of his essays. In the twentieth century, La Perle inspired a series of dramatisations that …
