Roume de St. Laurent ... A Memoir

"A creole cocktail of political thriller, historical romance and dashing picaresque replete with pirates and lost gold, corrupt financiers, ravishing coquettes, rabid revolutionaries and future emperors (Dessalines, Naploeon), Roume invites us to consider modernity in the New World, or what Besson frequently refers to as “the nightmare nest of slavery”. In dramatic fashion Roume examines the entanglement of Europe and the Caribbean on the cusp of the Haitian Revolution, the crossroads where the spirits of outmoded European feudalism and nascent capitalism, Enlightenment libertarianism and universalism collided with and contested the magical realism of an Afro-Creole worldview uneasily yet expediently allied with the ambitions of the offspring of the entanglement – the conflicted mulattoes.”

(Simon Lee,  Trinidad Guardian, 3 October 2016)

"Roume ‘works’ as a story from beginning to end, always moving and exciting, always unveiling inner truths about the Trinidadian or Caribbean spirit but also about the human spirit. It is never sensational, not even when you’re describing the horrors of the French Revolution. You ‘explain’ Trinidad better than any author I’ve read, although ‘explaining’ Trinidad is not your main goal. (Or is it?)
Most impressive to me is how you are able to display everywhere in your account such a keen sense of the virtue of restraint and subtlety.  I kept waiting for excess but never found it, not even once. The ‘poetical’ passages and touches are always deeply moving, and plausible, too. The whole thing is stunning.”

(Arnold Rampersad, Letter to the Author, 12 August 2016)

"Philippe Roume de Saint Laurent—who was he? Was he one of Trinidad’s heroes? He’s been called the “coloniser” of the island; he had a lot to do with the 1783 Cedula of Population and the subsequent waves of French migration here, which did indeed “populate” the island and open it up to plantation development….This long, sprawling novel reads like an epic romance, even though the basic facts about Roume’s career are accurate. There’s piracy in the Caribbean, hidden treasure (buried in a cave in Gasparee), revolution and war in France and Saint Domingue/Haiti, intrigues, villainies, manhunts and plots…. Besson’s exciting and lushly written novel gives us a romantic and fascinating view of Trinidad, France and the Caribbean during the era of Revolution—the best and the worst of times, as Dickens famously wrote at the start of his A Tale of Two Cities.”

(Bridget Brereton, Trinidad Express, 2 June 2016)

ISBN: 978-976-8244-21-5
530 pages
Softcover / Kindle

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Making room for Creole history
Review by Simon Lee
Published in the Trinidad Guardian, 3 October 2016

"Jerry Besson’s latest foray into the not so distant but largely forgotten past –a fictionalized memoire of Philippe Roume de Saint Laurent, the man who engineered the 1783 Cedula for Population which birthed modern Trinidad – ebulliently mixes genres in a stampede of individual and historical narratives, exploring aspects of Creole sensibility which have slipped through the seine of recent Caribbean historiography.
 Yet this heavyweight, at close to 500 pages and hugely ambitious in its scope (tracing the creolization of Enlightenment ideals and centering the ‘peripheral’ Caribbean at the heart of the ill-fated French and successful Haitian revolutions) lightly sidesteps the tedium of much historical fiction. Roume immerses readers intimately in the lives of such unforgettable imaginary characters as Sarusima the Carib or the demented white Creole Tante Mam’zelle, along with historical figures like Roume’s shape-shifting second wife Marianne ‘Soubise’ Rochard, the Grenadian mulatresse, whose fictional journals both anchor her husband’s narrative of opportunism and also provide another, insider’s point of view of the events he engaged in.
 A creole cocktail of political thriller, historical romance and dashing picaresque replete with pirates and lost gold, corrupt financiers, ravishing coquettes, rabid revolutionaries and future emperors (Dessalines, Naploeon), Roume invites us to consider modernity in the New World, or what Besson frequently refers to as “the nightmare nest of slavery”. In dramatic fashion Roume examines the entanglement of Europe and the Caribbean on the cusp of the Haitian Revolution, the crossroads where the spirits of outmoded European feudalism and nascent capitalism, Enlightenment libertarianism and universalism collided with and contested the magical realism of an Afro-Creole worldview uneasily yet expediently allied with the ambitions of the offspring of the entanglement – the conflicted mulattoes.
 Although the Haitian Revolution/War of Independence has attracted the attention of writers across the region from Walcott and Lamming, to Cesaire, Glissant and Carpentier, only historians like Laurent Dubois have attempted to chart revolutionary movements throughout the Caribbean at the end of the eighteenth century. In fiction it is only Besson who has made the connection between the Haitian uprising of 1791 and the Fedon uprising in Grenada of 1795, which like similar uprisings in St Vincent and St Lucia challenged the institution of slavery and European hegemony. It is the figure of Roume, a white Grenadian-born creole, who allows Besson to make the connection. Roume’s life journey took him on the wings of ambition and opportunism from Grenada to Trinidad, South America, Europe, Tobago and twice to Haiti, first as an agent of the French crown and then as High Commissioner of the French Revolution.
 Besson characterizes Roume as Frontier Man and Creole by birth and sometime conviction, embodying in him the contradictions of the Caribbean white massa slave-owning class, tainted by the legacy of the nightmare nest of slavery. When his first European-born wife Fanny recoils from him, still reeking from his latest sexual encounter on their Grenadian estate, he dashes her exotic fantasies (“a life of adventure, a sensual mixture of fecundity and elegance in a place on the frontier of the New World…she saw herself with him in paradise”) with all the callousness of those who viewed the slaves as property at worst, or “intelligent animals…without souls” at best. “You had to cover them, conquer them, breed them,” he rages at her with plantation pragmatism.
 Ironically it is a product of precisely this brutal regime, the mulatresse Soubise Rochard, who becomes his second wife, soul mate and companion for life. Born as Marianne Katronice, the illegitimate daughter of an estate owner and his slave mistress, she crosses the divide erected by the aristocracy of the skin when freed by her dying father. However, in pre-Fanon style, for survival purposes, she cultivates a Creole identity as Soubise, only reverting to Marianne when occasion demands.  She is aware of the common ground which unites her with Roume and which ultimately severs him from the Old World despite his manoeuvring: “As a Creole, descendant of Europeans born in these islands, Philippe had an understanding of the land, climate and the blacks…The salt of the Caribbean Sea ran in his veins…we, Philippe and I understood things differently –Phillipe’s imagination contained a great deal of my own.”
 Soubise also recognizes Roume’s fluid identity, knowing “he possessed the actor’s gift of being all things to all men. A born Creole.” His central belief in free will and choice, allied to his insatiable drive to be an agent of change lead him to a major role in the worst excesses of the French Revolution, when as a “blooded Jacobin” he embraces the period of The Terror drawing on an internalized legacy of violence: “we of the slave islands understand how to live without a sense of humanity.”

By positioning Roume at the centre of the revolution in France, Besson echoes the theory of CLR James and others that the modern world was birthed in the Caribbean, in Haiti. Some of the best elements of Enlightenment philosophical theory (equality, liberty) were compromised, betrayed and eventually reversed by the French, because philosophy makes for bad economics and the French Revolution depended financially on slavery as much as the Ancien Régime. As one of the metropolitan characters puts it when dismissing the slaves’ claims to the Rights of Man: “ Rights, human rights cannot apply to them. Soulless, they have not the faculty of choice. Anyway that would mean a collapse of the economy. France cannot afford to free her blacks.” It took the “soulless creatures” of Haiti to effect the praxis of Equal Rights and fight for them successfully, establishing the world’s first free black republic at the same time as Napoleon swept aside the vestiges of the French Revolution to re-establish the old order, in the new guise of an empire.
 Roume’s decline is directly linked to the ascendancy of both Toussaint l’Ouverture  and Napoleon. Sent back to Hispaniola as the Republic’s High Commissioner in 1799, Soubise recognizes the dilemma he faces: “ You must make up your mind, are you of the Caribbean, or do you belong on the other side, the Atlantic.” Although Roume has by now arrived at a common understanding with Toussaint whom he reveres (“both believed that a Caribbean interpretation of the republican ideal could be arrived at. This belief had at its centre the certainty shared by them that the African…was a complete human being.”) he elects to put down his bucket with Napoleon, rejecting Toussaint’s offer “Stay and this nation will honour you…You will stand, an equal, with the men who have liberated the New World.’ Roume’s hestitation can be read as symptomatic of the Creole malaise of failing to fully embrace first liberty and much later independence, the same psychopathology Fanon and Naipaul highlighted, which is still with us in the postmodern Caribbean.
 Roume can stand alone as a viscerally entertaining text, dramatizing the genesis of the modern Caribbean. Viewed in the context of Besson’s prolific oeuvre, both historical and fictional, we can also read it as the continuing expression of a minority or sidelined narrative in the post-independence history of the Caribbean – the Afro/French-Creole story. Political correctness, politically manipulated Afrocentrism and some of the worst aspects of globalization and (under) development have obscured or obliterated this narrative, which we must all be grateful to Besson for retrieving, in the interest of better understanding who we are now and how we got here."

Correspondence from the Revolutionary Atlantic 1797–1798

A selection of letters from the Trinidad Historical Society Collection, written by British naval commanders during the period of the French and British wars fought in the Caribbean Sea during the period of the French Revolution. These naval battles between France and England caused various islands in the Caribbean chain of islands to change hands and in so doing alter the destinies of millions of people. 

Sir Ralph Abercromby

Sir Thomas Picton

The 18th century Brigand War in the Caribbean

Perhaps if you have the kind of romantic imagination that is now going out of style you may feel yourself drawn towards a Caribbean experience that goes beyond being baked to a crisp while becoming charmingly incoherent after of your seventh rum-punch.  If this is at all the case you may want to learn something about a topic that just a mere two hundred or so years ago made hearts race and brave men think hard about finding a place to hide. No, I am not talking about hurricanes. I am talking about an episode in our past that was called the Brigand War and especially some of the personalities that shaped that period.

Historians have said that these Antialien islands are a product of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. What they mean is that as the 18th century came to a close disputes that had their origins in Paris, London or Madrid were settled right here on these sandy shores or upon that crystal clear horizon, that with a bit of luck, you might not only see the fabled green flash illuminate the day’s end, but actually catch it on your iphone so as to put it on face-book.

One of the more outstanding events to take place in that period was the advent of a man called Victor Hugues.  The European wars for territories in the Caribbean reached boiling point in the 1790s. The French Revolution of 1789 served to add civil war to the equation. Turbulence and violence, political upheaval and revolt reigned throughout the string of islands. From Grenada, to St. Vincent, though to St. Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe and among the maroons - former slaves who had taken to the Blue Mountains of Jamaica’s central range. And most violent and catastrophic of all, in Saint-Domingue now known as Haiti.

This ‘ring of fire,’ which was in fact the effect of the Age of Enlightenment upon the western world, sought to bring an end to the dominance of both altar and throne. It had commenced in North America, under George Washington, as the descendants of immigrants there battled against British control, and would continue with Simon Bolivar until the Wars of Liberation brought an end to Spanish domination in south America.

There had been fierce fighting  in the Eastern Caribbean for some years. This was characterized by battles at sea whose very names – the Battle of the Saints, the Battle of Cape St Vincent or the Battle of Grenada– conjure the choking odors of grapeshot, black powder and battle ablaze, as seventy eight gun frigates fought it out against magnificent sunsets of legendary splendor. 

In 1794, British troops took Martinique. A month or two later, they landed in Guadeloupe. There, for the first time, they came up against Victor Hugues, a former shop owner and minor merchant of Port-au-Prince on the island of Saint-Domingue, now called Haiti. It was said that he had been born at Marseilles, France, perhaps in 1760. He had a grasp on learning it was said and like so many young men he yearned to travel. He shipped aboard a merchantman as a cabin boy, sailing the trade routes on the Atlantic run. He often wintered in the Antilles, enjoying the wealthy mulatto lifestyle of the parvenus and the debaucheries of the harbour towns.

He is remembered as a raucous fellow of a huge sexual appetite, who tended to attract the young, naive and impoverished whites.  A thirst for knowledge and the pursuit of belonging made him seek the membership in an esoteric, pseudo-masonic order, called ‘Societé d’Harmonie’. He became the leader, some say even the Robespierre of the French Revolution in the Caribbean. He sailed from Marseilles armed with republican fever, gold, a handful of loyal henchmen and a guillotine.  Hugues was a daring man; people said that he was coloured and hated the ‘békés’, for being placed by them beyond the diameter of society despite his grasp of culture and his intelligence.

The squadron under his command attacked the British in 1795 in Basseterre and forced them out of Guadeloupe by the end of that year. His reign of terror took the lives of over one thousand royalists.

Victor Hugues then set to work to exterminate the monarchists and drive the British out of the Windward and Leeward islands as well as convert people of these islands  to the cause of the French republican revolution. He dispatched agents to St. Vincent to stir up the population there, then sent in Jacobin irregulars on the heels of the agents, and before long the English were hardpressed to keep the capital Kingstown, while the French, made up of black and coloured troops, and the Carib Indians overran and held the rest of the island. In Tobago, there was serious cause for alarm. Now once again in British hands, the African slaves, most of them French speaking with connections in other islands, had already been indoctrinated by the revolutionary fervour that had swept the islands, causing Scarborough to be burnt. Tobago’s planters were asking for a ‘stout frigate to be stationed in Great Courland Bay.

Hugues dispatched his agents to Jamaica, where for the third time a full-fledged war was being waged between the maroons, these were slaves who had freed themselves, and the occupying British troops. They were so heavily engaged that no reinforcements could be sent from Jamaica to relieve General Maitland’s fever-stricken English soldiers in Saint-Domingue who were attempting to take that island from the African slaves who were in revolt under a charismatic leader known to history as Toussaint Louverture. By 1798, the English were compelled to leave that island, while in Jamaica, the black maroons had to be accommodated after a truce was arranged high up in the cockpit country of the blue mountains.

Victor Hugues, undaunted, turned to Grenada, where there was tension between the English and the French speaking free colourds. He was a genius at sowing division and a brilliant manipulator! His agents promoted revolt in Grenada. They were followed by picket men, who built up cells or small cadres. Then, soldiers were brought in. A coloured Grenadian planter, Julien Fedon, was chosen as leader. An army of French and free blacks was formed, and then revolutionary troops were sent in from Guadeloupe.

The rising under Fedon broke out at midnight of 2nd March, 1795. They surrounded the town of Grenville and commenced a massacre that to this day is still remembered. After fighting off the British for more than a year Fedon withdrew to his estate Belvedere, 2000 ft above sea level on the sumit of Mt. St. Catherine. He established three camps, named them the ‘Field of Liberty’,  the ‘Field of Equality’ and the ‘Field of Death’. Soon the governor and his staff had been taken, and Fedon warned that any attempt to attack the island would mean their death.

Meanwhile, Victor Hugues was attempting to destabilise Trinidad, and to demoralise Don José Maria Chacon, the Spanish  governor. He offered to send his men to ‘help’ the governor to ‘control’ the island. Chacon in Trinidad responded by sending a few Spanish soldiers to join the British in Grenada in their planned attack on Fedon’s mountain fortress.

Terrible rainstorms lashed Grenada on the day that Fedon’s encampment was attacked. The English troops were pinned down by relentless fire from above. Fedon’s troops felled huge trees. The English commander inexplicably killed himself. Yet the attack was maintained.

At the ‘Field of Death’ a terrible massacre had taken place. The hostages were executed. The governor’s wife and daughters, his aid and accompanying officers were all killed in a hail of bullets. Some 55 persons died. There were a few survivors, among them Dr. John Hay, Fr. McMahon and a Mr. Kerr.

The British armed a contingent of loyal slaves, the ‘Corps of Loyal Black Rangers’, and pursued Fédon’s men while garrisoning St. Georges. In April, Sir Ralph Abercromby arrived in Grenada with troops and attacked the mountain stronghold. He defeated Fedon there, but not before another 20 hostages had met their deaths.

None saw Fédon die. He was last seen trying to sail away in a small boat and is said to have drowned. Thus ended the Battle Mt. Qua Qua.

Over 150 years later, in the latter part of the 20th century, Grenada again experienced revolution, overthrow and massacre of more than 100 citizens at the fort in St. Georges. Is this a case of history repeating itself? Or is this a matter of unresolved issues playing themselves out? It is said that people who do not know their past are doomed to repeat it.

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Dillon

He was the fifth generation of his family to hold the rank of colonel in the regiment that bore his name. His people, like many Irish and Scottish aristocrats, had allied themselves to the French throne, serving the kings as statesmen and soldiers, fighting for the Catholic cause in the wars that ebbed and flowed across Europe from the reformation to the French Revolution.

Service to the crown had now brought him to this island in the contested west. The cannon, silent, regarded the sunset, a golden ball sinking quickly into a warm tropical sea, not without splendour.

He turned towards the house, the smell of wood smoke and the sound of the laughter of his officers playing at whist in the huge verandah. He smiled and waved, walking past the barefooted man in dark blue livery, trimmed in gold, whose freshly oiled feet and legs reflected in the highly polished floor.

He took the staircase quickly, the yellow glow of the drawing room receding. He heard the tinkle of the crystal chandelier, the wind was rising. he turned the large brass knob in the tall white door and stepped into the darkened room. It contained just a bed, large with turned posts of a rosy brown - coloured island wood of the same colour and texture of her skin. The thickness of her lips always surprised him with their fullness, the fineness of her eyes often amazed him with their brilliance. She took him in at a glance, she possessed the wisdom that women sometimes have when they love to distraction.

In the morning light, the night was like a dream. Roume awaited him in the mahogany-furnished office. The vast desk was arranged to display a map of the island. Together, they planned the building of the windward road, a spectacular work that neither of them would finish. It would involve hundreds of slaves over the next five years and would link Port Louis, as Scarborough was now called, to Tyrrels Bay and beyond, and facilitate the development of the rich river valleys whose names reminded him of the English countryside. He had not met his predecessor, the Vicomte d'Arrot, who had succeeded de Blanchefort, who had taken the surrender from the British governor Ferguson after a heroic land battle. Ferguson gave surrender only after they had started to burn the plantations. Lt. Governor George Ferguson had been congratulated on the gallant defense of the island by its conquerors.

Dillon had come to appreciate Philippe Roume, a creole from the island of Grenada. Roume had been named 'ordinateur', adjudicating over the island's Anglo-French system. He brought a sense of order to the chaos of the conflicting land laws. As a creole, he had a feeling for the land and the slaves that worked it. He had also introduced him to the island's beauty, and had spoken passionately of these islands in a futuristic sense.

Dillon realised that Roume was hardly a European anymore, as the salt of the Caribbean now ran in his veins. Through energy and vision, the young creole had created the opportunities of the establishment of a French population on the Spanish island of Trinidad. Now he served the French king's interest on this island, Tobago.

In the Great Bay, called by the English Rockly Bay, a brigantine, freshly arrived, was discharging a cargo of colonists. Under the French administration, which was to last 12 years, some 540 Europeans and 300 free coloured people with some 14,170 slaves would come. Exports in 1789 would be 2.5 million pounds of sugar and 1.5 million pounds of cotton. It was in this period during his stewardship that to be known as to be 'rich as a Tobago planter' was an indication of considerable wealth.

After luncheon, Dillon took siesta. His hammock was slung so low that it almost touched the gallery floor. His linen shirt was opened to the waist. She sat at his feet, waiting to be read to from a book of stories by La Fontaine. She loved the French language and would look at his mouth as he pronounced the sometimes strange and indefinable words. She had only patois. She would have two sons for him, and from one generation to the next, they would pass the heirlooms left behind by the governor, even when the memory of their significance and eventually themselves had been lost. His name would live on in testimony of their love: Dillon of Tobago.

A footnote: Arthur Count Dillon, returned to France to serve his king in his hour of peril, losing all in the revolution that would devastate his land.

Philippe Rose Roume de St. Laurent continued to serve France's interest in the Caribbean in Haiti as one of the commissioners of Toussaint L'Ouverture. He married his Tobago lover Miriam Rochard in Haiti.

In 1790, Scarborough was destroyed due to the mutiny of revolutionary French troops who set the town ablaze. Shortly afterwards, a hurricane caused severe damage throughout the island. On the 15 April, 1793, the British under Admiral Sir John Laforey and General Cornelius Cuyler captured the island.