Enlightenment Tropes in French Popular Theater on the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s

Abstract

Anja Bandau’s chapter focuses on the French reception of the Haitian Revolution in two plays staged in Directory France: Pigault-Lebrun’s Le blanc et le noir (1795) and Béraud and Rosny’s Adonis ou le bon nègre (1798). Although the works belong to different genres – bourgeois drama and melodrama – and adopt different strategies, both seek to quell the violence of the uprising, drawing on Enlightenment discourse, staging improbable scenes of forgiveness and using sentimental tropes and the family romance to reconcile black and white characters. As Bandau shows, the events in Haiti are seen through the lens of the post-Terror period, which sought to avoid at all costs the bloody excesses of the recent past.