This Day in Philosophy — 22 August: the Haitian uprising and the first Geneva Convention

The 22nd of August gathers into one day two events seventy-three years apart. Each takes hold of the same question from a different side: do the rights that come with being human really hold for everyone?

1791: the rising at Saint-Domingue#

In Saint-Domingue, France's richest colony in the Caribbean, enslaved people led by Dutty Boukman set fire to the Noé sugar plantation on the night of 22 August 1791. Historians count that fire the beginning of an insurrection that would last thirteen years and end in 1804 with the independent republic of Haiti.

A few days earlier a ceremony had been held in the forest, at a place called Bois Caïman. The date of the ceremony is disputed in the sources — some give 14 August, others 22 August. About the day the rising actually began there is no disagreement.

The philosophical question: universality put to the test#

The French Revolution had proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789. Its first article was unambiguous: men are born free and equal in rights.

Yet slavery continued in the colonies of the country that issued the declaration. The same assembly that pronounced human rights universal was looking for ways to protect the colonial economy.

The Haitian rising put that contradiction to the test not by arguing but by acting. What happens when a claim to universality is taken seriously by those it excludes? The answer was a war the empire lost.

C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins, published in 1938, was the first major work to place these events at the centre of world history.

The Hegel and Haiti argument#

One of the most debated theses in the history of philosophy over the past twenty-five years also has its origin here.

In an article published in 2000 and in her 2009 book Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, Susan Buck-Morss argued that the famous master-slave dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit was no abstract thought experiment: it was directly connected to the events in Haiti, which Hegel followed in the newspapers of the day.

The thesis is contested. Hegel makes no explicit reference to Haiti; the evidence is circumstantial, and critics say the connection is drawn too firmly. But the argument itself has been fruitful, for it has raised the question of whether the history of philosophy can be written in isolation from the colonial reality of its own age.

1864: war, too, has a limit#

On the same day in 1864, twelve European states — Switzerland, France, Prussia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Portugal, Italy, Sweden, Norway and Württemberg — signed at Geneva the Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field.

Behind the text stood the Genevan businessman Henry Dunant. After the battle of Solferino in 1859 Dunant had written down what he saw on the field, describing men dying of wounds for want of care.

The convention is counted the beginning of modern international humanitarian law, and it prepared the ground for the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The philosophical question: just war#

The idea behind it is old, but 1864 was the first time it was turned into a binding text: there are things that may not be done even in war.

The argument about just war, running since the scholastics, separates two questions. When is it right to go to war (jus ad bellum)? What limits hold while fighting (jus in bello)? The second question is independent of the first: even in an unjust war there are things that may not be done to the wounded and to prisoners.

Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars, published in 1977, is the principal reference for that distinction in contemporary debate.

Read together, the two events give this picture: the nineteenth century was the century in which human rights were both violated in the harshest terms and, for the first time, written into an international instrument. The distance between the two is the distance we are still working on.