Saint-Domingue was at the center of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, because people enslaved in this French Caribbean colony launched the Haitian Revolution, which ended slavery, defeated French colonialism, and created Haiti, the second independent nation-state in the Americas. Beyond this extraordinary achievement, the factors that helped bring about the Haitian Revolution were also important in other aspects of the Atlantic revolutionary age. Saint-Domingue had the largest enslaved population in the Caribbean and developed a white superiority ideology that was unique in the region. It had an unusually large free population of color, with leaders who tried to claim their civil rights. The colony’s planters had a unique preoccupation with slave poisoning, which they traced to an escaped slave named Macandal. The colony experienced unique environmental stresses, including an anthrax outbreak that killed thousands of people. Saint-Domingue’s sugar and molasses tempted North Americans to break British colonial trade laws, which helped produce the American Revolution. The colony also led the Caribbean in the capitalistic production of sugar and coffee, which were at the heart of Europe’s consumer revolution. Saint-Domingue’s indigo dye and cotton helped launch industrial textile manufacturing.

This essay explores the legacy and afterlife of François Macandal, a man who escaped enslavement on an eighteenth-century plantation in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. His fame as a poisoner and immortal rebel persist over time and space, reflecting transcaribbean associations of fetish making with spiritual and physical resistance on the plantation. Stories of Macandal and the fetish objects he crafted, also called macandals, continued to circulate in nineteenth-century Louisiana as one of many narratives of slave uprising and Revolution in the Americas. One example of the reach of Macandal’s story is the 1892 novel, Le Macandal: Épisode de l’Insurrection des Noirs à St. Domingue, published in New Orleans, Louisiana, by Marie-Joséphine Augustin. This work is part of a larger archive of how Macandal and his macandals shaped the literary realm. His story moves across genres arguing that Macandal is simultaneously the man, the fetish object, and the story in its many forms.