Jacques Tellier was a bossale band leader under Sans-Souci who, in mid-1803, was "seduced" by Cagnet into submitting to the French under Rochambeau.
He declared to his bands that it was in the interest of Africans to submit to the French rather than to Dessalines, who had sworn their extermination. He opened a market at Petite-Anse where the Congos sold provisions to the French, flew the tricolor flag in Congo-controlled territory, and - alongside Cagnet - blockaded food supplies to the indigène armies. This was one of the most significant betrayals of the final phase of the war. After the French defeat, his fate is not documented.
In the ScholarshipHow historians have read this figure.
How historians and scholars have interpreted this figure across different analytical traditions.
Fick's Making Haiti recovers figures like Jacques Tellier from the colonial archive of the 'war within the war' — the conflict between different factions of the revolutionary armies that the nationalist historiography simplified into a unified Black uprising. Tellier's role in the revolutionary armies' complex politics, including the dynamics of betrayal and co-optation that the 'war within the war' produced, appears in Fick's account within the category of resistance figures whose trajectories reveal the internal conflicts that the enslaved majority navigated alongside the external struggle against the colonial forces. Her subaltern methodology situates these figures within the structural pressures that the colonial archive records: the coercion and impossible choices that defined the revolutionary period's most radical actors.
Tellier represents the 'war within the war' figures whose complex trajectories Fick recovers from the colonial archive — the internal conflicts and betrayals the nationalist historiography's unified uprising narrative could not accommodate.
RelationshipsPeople connected to this life.
- OpposedPetit Noël Prieur
Petit Noël Prieur remained loyal to the independence cause while Tellier defected to the French — opposing factions within the bossale leadership.
- Allied withMavougou
Fellow bossale band leader in the same cluster of Congo commanders who submitted to the French in 1803.
- Allied withVamalheureux
Fellow bossale band leader in the same cluster of Congo commanders who submitted to the French in 1803.
- Allied withKakapoul
Fellow bossale commander who defected to the French alongside Tellier in mid-1803; both blockaded food to indigène forces.
- Allied withDonatien-Marie-Joseph de Rochambeau
Submitted to Rochambeau's French forces in mid-1803, flying the tricolor in Congo-controlled territory and supplying French troops with provisions through a market at Petite-Anse.
- OpposedJean-Jacques Dessalines
Declared to his bands that it was in the interest of Africans to submit to the French rather than to Dessalines, whom he claimed had sworn to exterminate them.