Preface to the Second EditionThe book you are about to read appeared in 1954, published by Les Presses Libres, in Port-au-Prince. The printing was paid for collectively by a subscription paid by researchers in Haiti at the time: historians, history professors, and enthusiasts of Haitian history. Editing was performed by our whole family, meaning my grandmother, my mother, the author (who, in 1954, had just turned fifty years old), my brothers Daniel, Jacques, and yours truly. I had just turned ten, Daniel was fourteen, and Jacques, nine. The youngest, Max, was only five. Our parents never thought we were "too small" to deal with serious matters. I am very grateful to them.
Étienne Charlier's
Overview has since been unavailable for more than fifty years. This is quite paradoxical, given the book's widespread critical success and the fact that it represented, for generations of rhetoric students, a true Holy Grail: the only Haitian history work covering the entire first part of the baccalaureate curriculum. Innumerable young people searched for it in vain, finding, in the best cases, only photocopies of chapters. Some also — the luckiest ones — bought a copy in more-or-less poor condition at exorbitant prices, which they immediately rushed to "crunch" from cover to cover, anticipating the looming exam. The publication of this edition finally changes a disastrous state of affairs for our young people, whose admirable patriotism deserves to be nurtured and supported by the best possible education. That is, by the most complete and reasoned knowledge possible of Haitian history. A people without history is a people without memory, a philosopher said. We have an exemplary history, both through its successes and its failures. We absolutely must know our roots. Étienne Charlier's book is certainly not the alpha and omega of historical science. But it is the work of a scrupulously honest historian, with an analytical mind devoted to truth that any reader, more than fifty years after the first publication of the work, cannot help but admire. For our young people, and also for our not-so-young people, such a work can only be enriching.
I would, however, feel remiss if I did not point out that another historian, a Trinidadian one, did just as well. This refers to C.L.R. James and his book The Black Jacobins.
Should we recall that Haiti, “bastard daughter of colonists and the sea” according to a poet, and
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