Beaubrun Ardouin

Nicholls's From Dessalines to Duvalier situates Beaubrun Ardouin as the foundational figure of Haitian mulâtre liberal historiography — the 19th-century historian whose eleven-volume Études sur l'histoire d'Haïti established the interpretive framework that the mulâtre elite would use to narrate Haitian history for the next century. Nicholls reads Ardouin's history as both scholarly achievement and class project: a systematic account of the founding period that elevated the free-colored military leadership, rehabilitated the mulâtre generals, and constructed a national narrative that made the mulâtre elite the rightful inheritors of independence. His treatment of Dessalines — whom Ardouin blamed for the 1804 massacre of the remaining white population — set the terms of a historical debate that noiriste scholars would challenge a century later.

Ardouin's Études established the mulâtre liberal historiographical framework — a national narrative that elevated free-colored military leadership and made the mulâtre elite the rightful inheritors of independence, setting terms that noiristes would challenge a century later.

Trouillot's Silencing the Past engages Ardouin's historiography as an example of how the production of historical narratives is inseparable from the politics of the moment in which they are written. Ardouin's 19th-century history produced certain silences — about the Bossale majority's role, about Dessalines's class politics, about the counter-plantation tradition — that Trouillot's framework helps us understand not as simple errors but as the products of archival power and the politics of narrative construction. His mulâtre liberal perspective determined what appeared in his archive as significant, what was collected and preserved, and what disappeared — shaping not just his history but the historical record that subsequent scholars would inherit.

Ardouin's history produced silences that Trouillot's framework reveals as the products of archival power — what his mulâtre liberal perspective deemed significant determined what was preserved, shaping the historical record subsequent scholars inherited.