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Haïti face à elle-même : le test de la volonté nationale

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  Haiti facing itself: the test of national will By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson* (Le Français suit) In a recent essay, a Haitian policy voice argued that the country should build a 10,000-soldier force, framing it not as nostalgia but as arithmetic: sovereignty costs money , insecurity costs more . A former Haitian military officer offered an even bolder vision — recruit 50,000 young men and women across all departments, finance security through diaspora-backed instruments, deploy thousands of customs agents to choke off weapons flows, and force diplomacy to serve a national plan rather than foreign timetables. Read emotionally, the proposal feels like a lifeline. Read operationally, it is a state-building project of extraordinary difficulty. The appeal is obvious. Haiti’s security vacuum is no abstraction; it is measured in blocked roads, shuttered schools, extorted commerce, and neighborhoods abandoned at dusk. In that landscape, the officer’s argument lands with force: on...
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La neutralité historiographique de Beaubrun Ardouin : une lecture critique à partir de la distribution des sentiments

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  Beaubrun Ardouin’s Historiographic Neutrality: A Critical Reading Through the Distribution of Sentiments   By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson * (Le Français suit) The question of historiographic neutrality in Beaubrun Ardouin’s Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti is both important and difficult. Ardouin has long been regarded as one of the foundational historians of Haiti, a writer whose work preserves indispensable details about the Revolution, the early state, and the political struggles of the nineteenth century. Yet like all historians—especially those writing close to the events they narrate—Ardouin does not stand outside history. He writes from within a field of memory, political judgment, and social positioning. The issue, then, is not whether he is “biased” in some crude sense, but whether the distribution of sentiments in his text suggests significant departures from historiographic neutrality . A sentiment-based reading of the passages devoted to Toussaint Louverture,...
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Beaubrun Ardouin et le traitement historiographique de Toussaint, Dessalines, Pétion et Christophe

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  Beaubrun Ardouin and the Historiographical Treatment of Toussaint, Dessalines, Pétion, and Christophe By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson * (Le Français suit) The work of Beaubrun Ardouin , and especially his Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti , occupies a central place in nineteenth-century Haitian historiography. Long read as a first-rank source on the Haitian Revolution and the early decades of independence, it also deserves to be studied as a work of political and memorial construction. Ardouin does not simply recount events; he orders the past, ranks historical actors, distributes admiration and reserve, and offers, through his writing, a particular vision of the Haitian nation. In this respect, the way he treats Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Alexandre Pétion, and Henri Christophe is especially revealing. These four figures stand at the heart of the Haitian national narrative. Each embodies a distinct mode of power, a conception of the state, and a political mem...
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