This history of Guadeloupe, by a self-taught black typographical worker and journalist born in Point-à-Pitre in 1879, was originally published in 1921. Unavailable for years, it is not cited in major recent studies of Guadeloupean history such as Anne Pérotin-Dumont’s Être patriote sous les tropiques (1985) and Allain-Philippe Blérald’s Histoire économique de la Guadeloupe et de la Martinique du XVIIe siècle à nos jours (1986). Gabriel Debien dismissed it as “singularly insignificant” in one of his bibliographical chronicles. It deserves a friendlier reception.
To be sure, it is old-fashioned history. Each of twelve chapters covers a precisely delimited chronological period: 1492-1635, 1635-40, 1640-50, and so on up to 1871-1900; and within each chapter the material is organized by year: 1492, 1493, 1496, 1501, etc. The subtitle of the book (“Guadeloupe physique, économique, agricole, commerciale, financière, politique et sociale …”) is somewhat misleading. Major hurricanes and earthquakes are mentioned, and summary census statistics on the population and economy are supplied, but this is primarily a political narrative interspersed with extracts from official documents and frequent quotation of nineteenth-century historians of Guadeloupe such as Auguste Lacour and Jules Ballet, when their observations support Oruno Lara’s very different reading of the island’s past.
The book’s interest lies precisely in its radical critique of the historiography of the French Antilles up to 1900. Lara’s father was a slave until 1843 and his mother until 1848. His narrative can be read as a document of how an exceptional individual from this background read between the lines of histories of his country written by French colonial administrators or by members of the privileged class in Guadeloupe to discover their meaning for people like himself; and he does passionately rewrite the history of Guadeloupe from the bottom up.
To take one example, against an estimate of almost 2,000 white victims of Victor Hugues’s colonial Terror, Lara cites the 10,000 blacks killed to reestablish slavery in Guadeloupe (p. 158). Why, he asks, did not Napoleon instead use the 25,000 black soldiers in Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe in 1800 to conquer Spanish and British colonies filled with slaves ready to revolt (p. 125)? That alternative is largely forgotten, although it was taken seriously by colonial officials who would have had to contend with it, and it helps to explain why so many black officers in Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue initially welcomed the expeditionary forces sent to repress them.
