Birth of a Nation: The Creation of the Haitian Flag and Haiti's French Revolutionary Heritage

According to an oft-repeated story, Haiti's blue and red flag was born at the May 1803 Arcahaye conference, where Jean-Jacques Dessalines dramatically cut the French tricolor with his saber, leaving two strips that Catherine Flon, the Haitian Betsy Ross, sewed back together. Dessalines' supposed gesture symbolized his countrymen's desire to break away from France; it also had important racial connotations, since the reconstituted flag united the blue and the red of the French tricolor (that is, blacks and mulattoes) at the expense of the white strip that had once occupied the central role. The episode was a foundational moment that Haitians commemorate every year on May 18, the jour du drapeau, but its very centrality makes it ripe for ex post facto mythologizing on a scale similar to the extensive folklore surrounding the August 1791 Bois Caiman ceremony.1 Archival sources support few of the details found in the popular version of the flag's creation, nor can many of them be found in the works of Thomas Madiou and Beaubrun Ardouin, whose famous histories were drawn from oral histories collected from revolutionary veterans. So dubious is the entire episode, in fact, that its very date (May 18, 1803) and place (Arcahaye) are most likely inaccurate. Many of the factual errors found in existing accounts can be traced back to a desire by mulatto and black authors to emphasize the role that Alexandre Petion or Jean-Jacques Dessalines played in the revolutionary struggle, so the popular version of the flag's creation, however inaccurate, is an interesting window into Haiti's internal racial divisions. The actual history of the flag, as it can be recreated through archival resources, yields another, more unexpected insight: Haiti's flag and other state symbols were profoundly inspired by French revolutionary iconography. This symbolic continuity may come as a surprise considering that Haiti was born of a singularly violent conflict, but it is consistent with the letters and speeches issued by revolutionary actors in the first half of 1803, which indicate that mere months before Haiti's actual independence the rebel leaders defined themselves not in opposition to France and the white race but as defenders of the French revolutionary heritage. Far from being a symbol of national independence, and even less so of racial war, during the months that surrounded its creation the bicolor Haitian flag was a political standard representing the rebels' support for the 1794 law of emancipation. Only in the summer and fall of 1803 did Dessalines advocate a program of outright independence and (in early 1804) the massacre of most white Frenchmen remaining in Haiti. THE CONTENTIOUS HISTORY OF THE HAITIAN FLAG The first detailed account of the creation of the Haitian flag appeared in Madiou's 1847 history of Haiti. According to Madiou, the rebels favored independence by the time they defected from the French army in October 1802, an ambition they publicized by taking off French insignia from their regimental flags. But the French captured one such flag in a batde near Croix-des-Bouquets in December 1802, then published a pamphlet alleging that the rebels did not aspire to declare independence since they still fought under the tricolor, and Petion asked Dessalines for a more apt symbol. Dessalines thus designed a bicolor, blue-and-red flag before the Arcahaye conference by cutting out the white strip from the. tricolor. A rebel barge flew one of these flags during a May 1803 naval battle off Arcahaye, (as shown in a report by the French admiral Louis-Rene de LatoucheTreville); during the encounter, one mulatto captain named Laporte chose to scuttle his barge and sacrifice his life rather than surrender the flag.2 In Dessalines' mind, the flag symbolized independence and racial war. Aujourd'hui nous combattons pour l'independance de notre pays, et notre drapeau rouge et bleu est le symbole de l'union du noir et du jaune, he told the southern army in July 1803. …