Human rights and the Haitian Revolution: Rights, inequality and movement texts

The revolution in Haiti in 1791, when slaves rebelled against France and abolished slavery, has recently become a touchstone in discussions about the history of human rights. The objective of the study is to investigate whether the Haitian Revolution deserves to be included in this history. While taking its point of departure in debates between approaches that stresses authoritarianism and inequality in the Haitian Revolution against arguments about the prominence of human rights, the study is motivated by deficient assumptions in both interpretations. As rights have been analysed as ideas in isolation from the movement dynamic of the revolution and apart from social conditions such as inequality, different archival sources have been conflated. To avoid these limits, the study is based on social movement theory and textual analysis of archival sources. Rights are studied in the movement texts of the Haitian Revolution – publicly announced texts in the movement’s name, which require support of the revolutionary base – as a part of its collective identity. The collective identity is related to the movement’s origin, its collective acts and the repression it faced according to the method of process tracing. By illustrating the strengths of the methodological design, the study offers an approach to human rights in general, focused on social movements and inequality, alongside contributions to the fields centred on social movement theory, the Haitian Revolution and human rights.