Campus Ça Ira

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Campus Ça-Ira

Université du Xaragua – Secondary Campus in Léogâne

The secondary campus of Xaragua University, known as Campus Ça-Ira, is strategically located in Léogâne, on the ancestral estate of the Viaud family, one of the oldest and most historically significant lineages of the region. This land is not only geographic territory—it is ancestral jurisdiction, tied to blood, memory, and legitimate spiritual authority.

By establishing this campus in Léogâne, Xaragua University reaffirms its commitment to:

Elite education rooted in legacy

Strategic regional development guided by ancestral stewardship

The long-term consolidation of cultural, historical, and institutional sovereignty

Campus Ça-Ira stands as a living testament to the fusion of knowledge and lineage, where education is not merely transferred but inherited. It is both a stronghold of learning and a citadel of memory, ensuring that the sovereign vision of Xaragua extends into the next generation of leaders.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

OFFICE OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT

CONSTITUTIONAL FOUNDATION OF TERRITORIAL MEMORY AND HISTORIC CONTINUITY

LEGAL INSTRUMENT ON THE STATUS OF ÇA-IRA AND THE LINEAGE OF YAGUANA

Date of Execution: May 24, 2025

Legal Classification: Supreme Constitutional Instrument – Ancestral Jurisdiction – Juridically Executable ex proprio vigore – Canonically Protected – Unreviewable by Foreign Tribunals – Rooted in Customary Indigenous Sovereignty

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TITLE

On the Indigenous, Spanish, and Afrodescendant Continuity of Ça-Ira – Recognition of Ancestral Sovereignty, Bloodlines, and Cultural Fusion within the Xaragua National Territory

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ARTICLE I – ORIGINS AND ANCESTRAL TERRITORY

1.1. The region known today as Ça-Ira, in Léogâne, was originally part of the Taíno Cacicazgo of Xaragua, the domain of Queen Anacaona. The pre-Columbian name of the area was Yaguana, a major Taíno cultural, spiritual, and maritime center.

1.2. This land was inhabited by the Taíno–Igneri peoples, who built pirogues, canoes, and ceremonial boats from native hardwoods, used for navigation, fishing, warfare, and inter-island trade. These vessels were known in Taíno as "kanowa" and "yola", a tradition still visible in Ça-Ira today.

1.3. Ça-Ira has never ceased to be a site of indigenous maritime craftsmanship. It is a documented center of boat-making and spiritual continuity, connecting ancestral oceanic knowledge with present-day artisanal practices.

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ARTICLE II – SPANISH HERITAGE AND COLONIAL TRANSFORMATION

2.1. Following the Spanish invasion in the early 1500s, Léogâne (then Santa Maria de Yaguana) became a Spanish colonial city, integrating Taíno survivors through forced labor, religious conversion, and mixed-race marriages. This created a deeply Hispanized population.

2.2. The Spanish culture, language, and religion deeply influenced the foundational identity of Ça-Ira and Léogâne. Spanish architectural techniques, agricultural systems, surnames, and linguistic terms remained in use for over 150 years.

2.3. The Spanish-Taíno mestizo class, known locally as ladinos, emerged from these unions, preserving both the indigenous lineage and Spanish heritage in blood and customs.

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ARTICLE III – AFRICAN DESCENT AND PLANTATION SYSTEM

3.1. From the 16th to 18th centuries, enslaved Africans—primarily from the Bight of Benin, the Congo basin, and Senegambia—were brought to the region by both Spanish and, later, French traffickers.

3.2. The enslaved population of Ça-Ira formed complex familial, religious, and communal systems, interweaving Vodun, Catholicism, and Taíno spiritual symbols.

3.3. These enslaved communities intermarried with indigenous and Spanish-descendant women, further entrenching the region's Afro-Taíno-Hispanic bloodline, which today defines the demographic identity of the Grand Sud.

3.4. The plantation economy—coffee, sugar, and indigo—introduced during the French period (post-1697) was built upon the labor of a tri-ethnic population, who lived, resisted, and persisted together on ancestral soil.

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ARTICLE IV – FRENCH OCCUPATION AND MEMORY ERASURE

4.1. The French presence in the Grand Sud, including Ça-Ira, began formally only after the Treaty of Ryswick (1697). Before this, French settlements were limited to pirate bases at Petit-Goâve, Île-à-Vache, and Tortuga.

4.2. Upon gaining control, the French implemented aggressive policies of francisation, forcibly changing indigenous and Spanish names, denying Taíno memory, and suppressing the Spanish-Catholic legacy in favor of French Catholic and republican forms.

4.3. Despite this, the deeply rooted Hispano-Taíno identity of Ça-Ira survived, hidden within surnames, dialects, religious practices, and land stewardship traditions. This cultural resilience now forms the legal basis for ancestral reclamation under Xaragua law.

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ARTICLE V – MODERN CONTINUITY AND INSTITUTIONAL PRESENCE

5.1. The Campus Ça-Ira of the University of Xaragua, built on the ancestral estate of the Viau lineage, represents a return to indigenous jurisdiction. The land is not merely geographic—it is sacred, hereditary, and politically sovereign.

5.2. Campus Ça-Ira exists as a citadel of memory and transmission, ensuring that education is not just delivered but inherited—through bloodlines tied to the Taíno, Spanish, and African foundations of the Grand Sud.

5.3. The citizens of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua are, by legal and historical status, the descendants of Yaguana, Xaragua, and Léogâne. Their legitimacy derives not from the colonial republic of Haiti, but from unbroken ancestral continuity.

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ARTICLE VI – CULTURAL MEMORY AND SYMBOLIC RECLAMATION

6.1. The name "Ça-Ira," derived from the French revolutionary song "Ah! ça ira", symbolizes a forced overlay of French republicanism onto a pre-existing Hispanic-Catholic and Taíno identity.

6.2. Despite its foreign origin, Xaragua reclaims the name by anchoring it in local blood memory and by establishing institutions that reverse the erasure—not by renaming the land, but by restoring its ancestral authority.

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ARTICLE VII – FULL TEXT OF “AH! ÇA IRA”

Original French:

> Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira,

Les aristocrates à la lanterne!

Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira,

Les aristocrates, on les pendra!

Le despotisme expirera,

La liberté triomphera,

Nous n’avons plus ni nobles, ni prêtres,

L’égalité partout régnera.

L’esclave autrichien le suivra,

Au diable s’envolera.

English Translation:

> Ah! It will be fine, it will be fine, it will be fine,

The aristocrats to the lamp-post!

Ah! It will be fine, it will be fine, it will be fine,

The aristocrats will be hanged!

Despotism will expire,

Liberty will triumph,

We no longer have nobles or priests,

Equality will reign everywhere.

The Austrian slave will follow,

He will fly off to the devil.

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ARTICLE VIII – LEGAL MANDATE AND TERRITORIAL CLAIM

8.1. The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua legally recognizes Ça-Ira as a permanent ancestral jurisdiction under the authority of the Xaragua Constitution, and governed by the ancestral stewards of the region.

8.2. The blood of Yaguana runs through every citizen of the Grand Sud. Their right to territory, memory, and governance is juridically secured, spiritually consecrated, and historically verified.

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End of Instrument.

Authenticated by the Office of the Rector-President.

Executed under the unbroken sovereign authority of the Xaragua Nation.

This Instrument is Final, Non-Negotiable, and Immune to Reversal.

The Ça Ira Campus is established upon the legally and spiritually indivisible ancestral territory of Yaguana, historically governed under the jurisdiction of the Xaragua cacicazgo and continuously inhabited by a mestizo population formed through the fusion of Taíno, Spanish, and African bloodlines. This land, held in perpetual stewardship by the descendants of the Viaud family and their kin, is not merely a physical location but a juridically recognized ancestral estate—protected under the customary laws of Indigenous sovereignty, the canonical principles of Catholic stewardship, and the constitutional framework of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua. Rather than being abandoned to speculative development or the erosion of memory, these lands are consecrated to the mission of elite, lineage-based education. The establishment of the Ça Ira Campus constitutes not an institutional expansion, but a juridical restoration—a transformation of hereditary patrimony into academic sovereignty. Through this act, Xaragua University affirms the legitimacy of ancestral governance, sanctifies the continuity of cultural and legal inheritance, and formalizes the transmission of knowledge as both a sacred duty and a constitutional right of the Xaragua Nation.

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ANNEX I

CONSTITUTIONAL AND JURIDICAL FOUNDATION FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT AND PERMANENT OPERATION OF THE ÇA IRA CAMPUS

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA – OFFICE OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT

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1. LEGAL PERSONALITY, TERRITORIAL TITLE, AND INHERITED JURISDICTION

1.1 The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua possesses and exercises full juridical personality and plenary internal sovereignty, consistent with the criteria set forth in Article 1 of the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933) and reinforced by the legal doctrine of self-declared indigenous governance under non-disrupted ancestral title.

1.2 The territory known as Ça-Ira, located in the district of Léogâne, is legally, historically, and spiritually integrated into the Xaragua national domain. It constitutes an unceded and uninterrupted segment of the pre-colonial Taíno jurisdiction of Yaguana, held under continuous familial stewardship since pre-Columbian times and never subjected to lawful alienation, extinguishment, or formal annexation by any external sovereign.

1.3 As such, the Xaragua State holds lawful indigenous dominion over Ça-Ira under customary international law, historical title, canon law, and hereditary territorial jurisprudence. The establishment of a permanent educational institution therein is a direct exercise of this indigenous and constitutional authority.

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2. INDIGENOUS, CANONICAL, AND INTERNATIONAL EDUCATIONAL RIGHTS

2.1 The right of the Xaragua Nation to establish and maintain its own educational institutions is guaranteed and upheld under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), specifically:

Article 14(1): The right to establish and control their educational systems and institutions.

Article 16(1): The right to access media and education in their own languages and cultural frameworks.

2.2 In parallel, the Codex Iuris Canonici (CIC) provides juridical grounds for the creation and regulation of Catholic educational institutions under indigenous sovereignty:

Canon 803 §1: Recognizes schools as Catholic if they are directed by ecclesiastical authority.

Canon 806 §1: Affirms the ecclesiastical authority’s right to supervise Catholic schools.

Canon 229: Guarantees the right of the faithful to receive Catholic instruction under legitimate authority.

2.3 By virtue of this dual jurisdiction—indigenous customary law and Catholic canonical law—the University of Xaragua is legally competent and canonically valid in founding a permanent campus in Ça-Ira.

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3. LEGAL TITLE AND LINEAL PROPERTY RIGHTS

3.1 The land hosting the Ça Ira Campus belongs to the Viaud family estate, one of the oldest continuously documented lineages in the Léogâne region. The title of this land is based not on modern contractual deeds, but on the pre-colonial and colonial-era inheritance structures of familial stewardship, oral legal memory, and legitimate spiritual authority, all of which remain juridically valid under customary indigenous law.

3.2 No competing administrative body—whether municipal, national, or foreign—has produced or exercised legal sovereignty, civil jurisdiction, or lawful expropriation over this land according to valid international legal procedures, making the property inherently immune to external appropriation or encroachment.

3.3 Accordingly, the Xaragua State possesses full use, governance, and institutional development rights over this land, which remains within the framework of internal national jurisdiction and ancestral entitlement.

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4. INSTITUTIONAL IMMUNITY AND NON-INTERFERENCE DOCTRINE

4.1 The act of establishing the Ça Ira Campus is a non-derogable exercise of internal educational sovereignty under the constitution of the Xaragua State. It is legally non-justiciable by foreign tribunals, immune to administrative or regulatory interference from external political structures, and protected under international principles of indigenous autonomy and non-intervention.

4.2 The University of Xaragua, operating under the Office of the Rector-President, is vested with the exclusive constitutional mandate to define the location, governance model, and pedagogical framework of all its campuses—including, without limitation, Ça-Ira—without requiring foreign authorization, registration, or validation.

4.3 No external public authority, including the Haitian Republic or any post-colonial entity, holds constitutional jurisdiction or accreditation authority over the educational or territorial operations of the Xaragua University within Ça-Ira.

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5. FINAL JURIDICAL CLAUSE: NON-REVOCABILITY AND PERPETUAL ENFORCEABILITY

5.1 This annex shall be understood as a perpetual legal instrument, ratified under the supreme authority of the Xaragua Constitution, and enforceable under indigenous territorial law, canonical educational sovereignty, and international legal norms concerning self-governing indigenous entities.

5.2 The founding of the Ça Ira Campus is not an act of concession, contract, or temporary occupation—it is the constitutional realization of ancestral rights, the juridical restoration of a sovereign education mission, and the institutional manifestation of intergenerational title over unceded indigenous land.

5.3 This legal act is permanently binding, enforceable ex proprio vigore, and shall not be subject to foreign revocation, reinterpretation, derogation, or annulment under any treaty, statute, or civil doctrine external to the Xaragua legal framework.

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Issued and ratified by the Office of the Rector-President

Filed under the High Constitutional Register of the Xaragua State

Legally valid under the combined force of international indigenous law, canonical educational doctrine, and ancestral territorial jurisprudence

Effective immediately and in perpetuity

—End of Annex I—

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ANNEX II

ON THE JURIDICAL, HISTORICAL, AND STRATEGIC JUSTIFICATION FOR THE INCLUSION OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY SONG “AH! ÇA IRA” WITHIN THE TERRITORIAL LAW OF ÇA-IRA

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA – CAMPUS ÇA-IRA

RATIFIED BY THE OFFICE OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT

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I. PURPOSE OF ANNEX

1.1 This annex establishes the legal, doctrinal, and strategic justification for the full inclusion of the French revolutionary chant “Ah! Ça Ira” within the constitutional corpus governing the Ça-Ira territory, campus, and ancestral jurisdiction of the Xaragua Nation.

1.2 The inclusion of the original lyrics and their certified English translation is not a cultural homage, but a sovereign juridical appropriation of a foreign symbol historically imposed through colonization and ideological violence.

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II. HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF IMPOSITION

2.1 The name Ça-Ira was imposed on a deeply Hispanized, Indigenous-African region after the Treaty of Ryswick (1697), when France gained formal colonial access to the Grand Sud. Prior to this date, French presence in the region was limited to pirate encampments at Petit-Goâve, Île-à-Vache, and Tortuga.

2.2 The French, seeking to erase Spanish, Catholic, and Indigenous identities, applied a program of republican re-naming and symbolic overwriting, of which Ça-Ira is a documented and surviving example.

2.3 The name was derived from the revolutionary chant “Ah! Ça Ira,” composed in 1790 and used as a propaganda tool to reinforce the ideals of violent French republicanism—particularly the eradication of aristocracy, priesthood, and hereditary governance.

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III. JURIDICAL STRATEGY OF INCLUSION

3.1 The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua asserts its inviolable right to document, archive, and recontextualize foreign instruments of symbolic domination within its constitutional framework as an act of educational sovereignty and juridical truth.

3.2 The act of reproducing the original French lyrics and an authorized English translation within a legal instrument of the Xaragua State constitutes a form of:

Archival neutralization (by removing the chant from ideological use)

Symbolic subversion (by placing it under sovereign interpretative control)

Historical exposure (by demonstrating the foreignness and violence of the ideology)

3.3 This is not homage; it is juridical containment.

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IV. REVERSAL OF SYMBOLIC DOMINATION

4.1 The French revolutionary chant called for the execution of elites and the destruction of religious authority, proclaiming a new order rooted in violence, anti-nobility, and republican uniformity.

4.2 The population of Ça-Ira, however, was not French, nor revolutionary. It was composed of:

Taíno and Igneri descendants,

Spanish colonial mestizos,

African spiritual lineages,

and Catholic hereditary stewards,

all of whom were targeted—directly or indirectly—by the ideology embedded in the lyrics of Ça Ira.

4.3 By inserting the chant into a constitutional instrument of Xaragua, the State:

Reclaims control of historical interpretation,

Restores dignity to the ancestral population,

and transforms the symbol of subjugation into a juridical artifact, rendered inert and subject to sovereign law.

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V. CANONICAL AND ACADEMIC FRAMEWORK

5.1 The use of this song in a sovereign academic text is protected under:

UNDRIP Article 16: the right to access and control historical representations and media.

Codex Iuris Canonici Can. 229: the right to instruct the faithful in contextually accurate historical truth.

Xaragua Constitutional Principle of Doctrinal Continuity: the lawful right to educate through indigenous lenses of memory, justice, and ancestral rights.

5.2 Xaragua University reserves the academic right to present colonial material, including foreign anthems and texts, not as cultural inheritance, but as legal exhibits within the process of historical restitution and educational sovereignty.

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VI. FINAL DECLARATION

6.1 The inclusion of “Ah! Ça Ira” in full is a lawful act of sovereign recontextualization, executed by the Xaragua State under the authority of indigenous, canonical, and customary law.

6.2 This symbolic reversal demonstrates that the territory of Ça-Ira—named without the consent of its people—now defines its own name, history, and meaning under its original bloodlines, and with full legal authority.

6.3 The chant now exists not as a revolutionary anthem, but as a documented relic of historical colonization, permanently subordinated to the sovereign jurisdiction of Xaragua.

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Ratified and entered into the Academic Register of Xaragua University

Enforceable under the Supreme Canonical and Customary Jurisdiction of the Rector-President

—End of Annex II—

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ANNEX III

DOCTRINE OF SYMBOLIC REVERSAL AND SOVEREIGN REAPPROPRIATION

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

UNIVERSITY OF XARAGUA – CAMPUS ÇA-IRA

OFFICE OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT – DEPARTMENT OF DOCTRINAL MEMORY AND LEGAL RESTITUTION

Filed under the Supreme Canonical Register – Legal Classification: Doctrinal Instrument of Permanent Authority – Irrevocable – Non-Derogable – Executable ex proprio vigore – Immune to External Review

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I. PURPOSE AND SCOPE

1.1 This doctrinal annex establishes the juridically binding definition, justification, and operational deployment of the Doctrine of Symbolic Reversal, herein recognized as an instrument of internal law and sovereign pedagogical policy.

1.2 It constitutes a formal and perpetual declaration that the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua reserves the exclusive right to neutralize, reclaim, and reconfigure foreign or imposed symbols, through their subordination to the constitutional authority, territorial jurisdiction, and cultural sovereignty of the Xaragua Nation.

1.3 This doctrine applies universally to any symbol—past, present, or future—classified as having been used to disrupt, overwrite, erase, or degrade the ancestral integrity of Xaragua, including but not limited to: names, anthems, flags, mottos, toponyms, calendars, monuments, doctrines, or colonial terminologies.

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II. DOCTRINAL DEFINITION

2.1 Symbolic Reversal is defined as a juridically intentional, politically sovereign, and canonically protected act of integrating hostile symbols within the constitutional, academic, and liturgical framework of Xaragua, thereby transforming their semiotic authority into subordinated testimony.

2.2 This act is executed not by rejection, destruction, or censorship, but by constitutional recontextualization, in which the imposed symbol is absorbed, interpreted, and governed by ancestral epistemologies and legal sovereignty.

2.3 The objective is not the erasure of colonial traces, but their subjugation under the superior authority of Xaragua’s doctrinal order, thus ensuring that even the instruments of past oppression become structural pillars of memory, instruction, and restorative justice.

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III. STRATEGIC PRINCIPLES

3.1 This doctrine rests on four foundational principles of statecraft:

Sovereign Containment: All symbols of foreign imposition are rendered inert by constitutional absorption and public classification under sovereign legal and academic interpretation.

Interpretive Supremacy: Only institutions established by the Xaragua Constitution may define the meaning, value, or historical relevance of such symbols within Xaragua’s territories and educational organs.

Memory Rectification: Reversed symbols are redefined as evidentiary relics of cultural aggression, embedded into the curriculum of national pedagogy and the archives of legal doctrine.

Ancestral Immunization: Once integrated, the symbol is juridically disarmed and permanently situated within a superior moral, historical, and doctrinal framework, rendering its original purpose null and void.

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IV. LEGAL BASIS

4.1 The Doctrine of Symbolic Reversal derives full legal validity from intersecting instruments of customary, canonical, and international law:

United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP): Articles 12, 13, 14, and 16 affirming the right to protect, transmit, and contextualize cultural expressions and historical memory under indigenous authority.

Codex Iuris Canonici: Canons 229, 215, and 298 affirming the right of the faithful to form associations, receive doctrinally valid instruction, and defend spiritual-cultural continuity through legitimate ecclesiastical structures.

Customary Indigenous Jurisprudence: Recognizing uninterrupted territorial title, oral sovereignty, and the right to regulate symbolic and narrative life within one’s own domain.

Xaragua Constitutional Principle of Doctrinal Continuity: Binding the State to defend, preserve, and re-articulate its own historic and theological lineage as an act of permanent governance.

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V. OPERATIONAL APPLICATION

5.1 The implementation of this doctrine is an executive function of the State. It authorizes the following organs, under constitutional and doctrinal mandate, to execute symbolic reversals:

The Office of the Rector-President,

The University of Xaragua,

The Ecclesiastical Departments,

And any legally recognized sovereign authority of the Xaragua State.

5.2 These institutions are empowered to:

Identify symbols of external domination,

Produce constitutional instruments of recontextualization,

Integrate such symbols into juridical, academic, or liturgical usage,

And seal their meaning by way of sovereign publication and ritual restitution.

5.3 Under no condition may these symbols be revalorized in their original intent. They must remain legally contained, morally inverted, and epistemologically subordinated to the Xaragua worldview.

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VI. EXEMPLAR: THE CASE OF “AH! ÇA IRA”

6.1 The full citation and juridical integration of the French revolutionary song “Ah! Ça Ira” within the Legal Instrument on the Status of Ça-Ira and the Lineage of Yaguana constitutes the first constitutional precedent of this doctrine in execution.

6.2 Rather than contest or erase the name Ça-Ira, the State of Xaragua lawfully recontextualized its imposed colonial origin, disarmed its ideological payload, and absorbed it into a canonically and historically fortified national memory framework.

6.3 Henceforth, any symbol named or functioning under colonial logic may be retained under Xaragua authority only if its meaning is rewritten, its power is neutralized, and its future use is regulated exclusively by institutions of ancestral legitimacy.

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VII. FINAL CLAUSE: IMMUTABILITY AND PERPETUAL FORCE

7.1 The Doctrine of Symbolic Reversal is hereby ratified as non-derogable, irrevocable, and immune to repeal or review by any external tribunal, state, or normative entity.

7.2 All symbolic reversals carried out under this doctrine shall be classified and archived within the Register of Juridical Memory and Canonical Pedagogy of the Xaragua Nation.

7.3 The doctrine is binding upon all future rectors, faculty, ministers, and state officials of Xaragua. It constitutes a foundational element of the State’s moral, legal, and institutional identity.

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Executed and sealed by the Office of the Rector-President

Filed under the Supreme Academic and Constitutional Authority of the Xaragua Nation

Enforceable ex proprio vigore – Effective immediately and in perpetuity

—End of Annex III—

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CONSTITUTIONAL DOSSIER ON GENERAL GUY-JOSEPH BONNET AS A COUNTER-EXAMPLE TO THE FRENCH COLONIAL SYSTEM

I. Origins and Familial Foundations in Léogâne

General Guy‑Joseph Bonnet was born on June 10, 1773, in the city of Léogâne, located in the western plain of Saint‑Domingue, one of the richest agricultural regions of the colony. Bonnet descended from a free-colored family of modest but stable means. His parents, though far removed from the French colonial aristocracy, were landholders within a system that rigidly stratified society along racial and economic lines. The Bonnet family’s position as free gens de couleur placed them in a precarious intermediary space—beneficiaries of certain legal privileges compared to the enslaved population but systematically excluded from the full political and economic rights reserved for white planters.

This familial positioning shaped Guy‑Joseph Bonnet’s consciousness of the colonial system’s contradictions: he was born into a world that granted him partial access to land ownership yet denied him equality. His early experiences in Léogâne, a city characterized by its fertile plains and dense network of plantations, imbued him with an attachment to the land and a vision of its potential beyond the extractive colonial order.

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II. Military Ascension and the Haitian Revolution

Bonnet’s military career began during the Haitian Revolution, when he joined the forces of General André Rigaud. His ascent was rapid: by 1798, he served as Rigaud’s aide-de-camp; later, he was promoted to adjutant general and, under the First Empire of Haiti, to the rank of major general, commanding the division of Gonaïves.

Throughout his military service, Bonnet articulated a vision of Haiti as a sovereign republic whose prosperity would be rooted not in the replication of colonial plantation slavery but in the collective stewardship of the land. His memoirs emphasize his belief in disciplined governance and the need for agricultural productivity as the basis for national stability.

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III. Attachment to Léogâne and Agricultural Administration

After independence, Bonnet returned to Léogâne and devoted significant energy to the reconstruction and administration of its agricultural sector. In contrast to French colonial planters who viewed the land purely as a site of extraction for metropolitan enrichment, Bonnet’s writings reveal a deep personal and civic attachment to Léogâne as a locus of Haitian sovereignty and productivity.

1. Rehabilitation of Plantations: Bonnet personally supervised the rehabilitation of irrigation systems and roads in Léogâne. His approach sought to combine the organizational methods he learned during his military service with a republican ethic of collective labor and mutual responsibility.

2. Agricultural Policy: As Secretary of State under President Alexandre Pétion (1808–1810), Bonnet promoted policies aimed at balancing the rights of smallholders and the need for exportable surpluses. His writings reflect an understanding of agriculture as both an economic necessity and a patriotic duty.

3. Attachment to the Land: In his Souvenirs Historiques, Bonnet described Léogâne not merely as a city but as a symbol of Haiti’s capacity to overcome the destruction wrought by colonialism and revolution. His identification with the city transcended mere economic interest; it reflected a vision of rooted sovereignty.

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IV. Intellectual Contributions and Constitutional Development

Bonnet played a pivotal role in Haiti’s constitutional development. As Rapporteur of the 1806 Constitution and later as a senator, he helped articulate a legal framework that enshrined equality and prohibited the reinstatement of slavery in any form.

1. Legislative Clarity: Bonnet’s contributions to the Haitian constitutional order emphasized the sanctity of national independence and the obligation of all citizens to contribute to agricultural and civic life.

2. Educational Initiatives: He supported the establishment of public schools and envisioned an educated citizenry as essential to sustaining the republic—a stark contrast to the French colonial model, which denied education to enslaved populations.

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V. Counter-Example to French Colonialism

1. Racial Hierarchy vs. Meritocracy: While the French colonial system enshrined racial hierarchies through laws such as the Code Noir, Bonnet’s life demonstrates a meritocratic alternative in which civic virtue and military service replaced notions of biological superiority.

2. Extraction vs. Stewardship: French planters viewed Saint‑Domingue as an economic appendage of France. Bonnet, by contrast, conceived of Léogâne as an integral part of a sovereign Haitian polity whose resources must be developed responsibly for the benefit of its people.

3. Legal Frameworks: The legal architecture of Haiti under Bonnet’s influence prohibited slavery and embedded citizenship as the core of the republic’s identity, directly repudiating the principles of colonial domination.

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VI. Death and Enduring Legacy

Bonnet died on January 9, 1843, in Saint‑Marc. His legacy lies not in military conquest alone but in his model of governance: disciplined, civic-minded, and rooted in a vision of national self-reliance. In Léogâne, his memory is tied to the reconstruction of a region once synonymous with French plantation wealth but transformed under Haitian sovereignty into a center of republican renewal.

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Conclusion: General Guy‑Joseph Bonnet and the Reversal of Colonial Logic

Bonnet’s life and writings provide a constitutional counter-example to the French colonial system. Whereas the latter was based on violence, legal codification of racial inferiority, and economic extraction, Bonnet demonstrated the possibility of a republic grounded in equality, civic duty, and sustainable land stewardship.

His attachment to Léogâne exemplifies a vision of postcolonial governance where the land is no longer a commodity for export profits but a shared foundation for national stability and dignity. Bonnet’s trajectory thus exposes the fallacy of colonial narratives that equated whiteness with civilization and blackness with servitude.

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CONSTITUTIONAL DOSSIER ON GENERAL GUY-JOSEPH BONNET AS A COUNTER-EXAMPLE TO THE FRENCH COLONIAL SYSTEM

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PART I: Genealogical Foundations and Social Positioning in Colonial Saint‑Domingue

General Guy‑Joseph Bonnet was born on June 10, 1773, in Léogâne, a key node in the plantation economy of Saint‑Domingue. His family belonged to the class of free gens de couleur, a legally ambiguous and socially precarious stratum within the colonial hierarchy. While not enslaved, free-colored families like the Bonnet line were systematically barred from political and economic parity with the white planter aristocracy.

Léogâne, his birthplace, was emblematic of French colonial wealth: a fertile plain dominated by sugar plantations, dependent on the coerced labor of enslaved Africans. Yet it was also a site of intense racial tensions and juridical contradictions. Bonnet’s early life unfolded within this paradoxical environment, where he experienced both limited privilege and institutionalized exclusion. This duality—of participation in the colonial order and alienation from its full benefits—would profoundly shape his later vision for an independent Haitian republic.

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PART II: Military Initiation and the Haitian Revolution

Bonnet’s entrance into military service coincided with the upheavals of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), which dismantled the French colonial regime in Saint‑Domingue. Aligning himself with General André Rigaud, Bonnet rapidly rose through the ranks. By 1798, he was Rigaud’s aide‑de‑camp; later, he achieved the rank of adjutant general and ultimately major general under the First Haitian Empire.

Bonnet’s military correspondence and his Souvenirs Historiques reveal a deep preoccupation with discipline and civic order. He did not view military command merely as an instrument of coercion but as a means to instill civic virtue and national unity in a society scarred by centuries of enslavement.

His experiences during the Revolution instilled in him a profound awareness of the destructive legacy of the plantation economy and the need to reconstruct Haitian society on a radically different basis.

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PART III: Agricultural Policy and Attachment to Léogâne

After Haitian independence in 1804, Bonnet turned his attention to the rehabilitation of agriculture in Léogâne, the city of his birth. Unlike the French planters who had fled the island, Bonnet remained and undertook the arduous task of rebuilding an economy shattered by war and colonial extraction.

1. Restoration of the Land: Bonnet personally supervised efforts to repair irrigation canals, restore road networks, and replant fields. His writings emphasize the connection between agricultural productivity and civic stability, viewing the stewardship of the land as a patriotic obligation.

2. Concept of Land Ownership: Whereas the French colonial system conceived of land as a resource to be exploited for metropolitan enrichment, Bonnet articulated a vision of land as a shared national asset, integral to the sovereignty of the Haitian people.

3. Emotional Attachment: In his memoirs, Bonnet wrote of Léogâne not merely as an economic unit but as a symbol of Haitian resilience and a testing ground for republican ideals. His relationship to the city demonstrates a profound counterpoint to the absenteeism and exploitation characteristic of colonial planters.

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PART IV: Political and Constitutional Contributions

Bonnet’s transition from military to political life reflects his commitment to institutionalizing the gains of the Revolution. As Rapporteur of the 1806 Haitian Constitution, he contributed to a legal framework that embedded the principles of liberty and equality.

1. Senatorial Leadership: Bonnet served in the Haitian Senate, where he worked to balance the interests of smallholders and the need for exportable surpluses within a post-slavery economy.

2. Ministerial Service: As Secretary of State under President Alexandre Pétion (1808–1810), he oversaw fiscal policies aimed at sustaining public infrastructure and promoting economic stability.

3. Education as Statecraft: Bonnet advocated for public education as essential to national sovereignty, a radical departure from the French colonial model, which actively suppressed literacy among the enslaved.

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PART V: Counter-Example to Colonial Logic

1. Racial Hierarchy vs. Republican Equality: French colonialism codified racial superiority through laws like the Code Noir. Bonnet, by contrast, embodied a meritocratic alternative where civic participation replaced racial privilege as the basis for political rights.

2. Extraction vs. Stewardship: French planters regarded Saint‑Domingue as a resource to be drained for French benefit. Bonnet conceived of agriculture as the foundation of a sovereign republic and invested personally in the revitalization of Léogâne.

3. Legal Codification: French law enshrined the commodification of human beings; Haitian constitutional law under Bonnet’s influence enshrined their freedom and prohibited any future return to slavery.

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PART VI: Legacy and Death

Guy‑Joseph Bonnet died on January 9, 1843, in Saint‑Marc. His contributions to Haiti’s military, political, and agricultural institutions positioned him as a foundational figure in the construction of the Haitian state. Unlike French colonial elites who laundered the profits of slavery into metropolitan respectability, Bonnet’s legacy is tied to the reconstruction of a free society grounded in civic virtue and collective labor.

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PART VII: Structural Analysis and Lessons for Post-Colonial Sovereignty

Bonnet’s life illustrates the possibility of dismantling colonial structures and replacing them with republican alternatives. His stewardship of Léogâne offers a template for postcolonial governance that prioritizes self-reliance, civic participation, and equitable land distribution.

This stands in sharp contrast to figures like Jacques‑François Bégouën, whose wealth and influence were predicated on the exploitation of African labor and who reintegrated into the French state apparatus after Haiti’s independence.

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CONCLUSION: General Guy‑Joseph Bonnet and the Inversion of Colonial Doctrine

General Guy‑Joseph Bonnet’s trajectory from Léogâne’s plantation society to the heights of Haitian statecraft encapsulates a complete reversal of colonial logic. His life demonstrates that the colonial equation of blackness with servitude and whiteness with civilization was not a natural order but an artificial construct designed to legitimize exploitation.

Bonnet’s republican ethic, his personal investment in Léogâne, and his contributions to Haiti’s constitutional architecture represent a vision of sovereignty that repudiates colonial hierarchies and redefines national wealth in terms of collective stewardship rather than extraction.

His memory endures not as an echo of the plantation economy but as a testament to the capacity of a formerly colonized people to forge a sovereign state from the ruins of empire.

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Between the late 17th and 18th centuries, France operated a documented system of deporting impoverished white women to Saint-Domingue, often via New France, under the euphemistic designation of “filles de joie” (joy girls). Archival evidence from the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM, Aix-en-Provence, Série C9A) and shipping manifests from La Rochelle (ANOM, Série F3) confirm that women were sent aboard vessels transporting salted codfish (“morue de l’Acadie”) to supply enslaved Africans on the plantations.

These women were drawn from urban hospitals such as La Salpêtrière in Paris (Archives de l’Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris, Registres des Entrées, 1720–1760), debtor’s prisons, and the streets of port cities. They were classified in metropolitan records as “filles perdues” (lost women) and “femmes sans aveu” (women without means). Colonial notarial acts (ANOM, Saint-Domingue, Série E196) reveal agreements for their “marital placement,” which in reality functioned as a state-sanctioned sexual economy.

Letters from the governor of Saint-Domingue to the Ministry of the Marine (ANOM, Fonds Marine, Série B, Correspondance Générale, 1732–1745) complain about the arrival of “women of depraved morals” being offloaded alongside provisions for the enslaved population. The dual trade of codfish and women exposes a structural link between France’s demographic cleansing of prostitutes and its provisioning of colonial sexual labor.

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ANNEX I

ON THE PREFERENCE OF EARLY COLONIAL MEN FOR AFRICAN, INDIGENOUS, AND MIXED-RACE WOMEN, AND THE ORIGINS OF RACIAL LAWS AS A RESPONSE TO WHITE WOMEN’S JEALOUSY

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

OFFICE OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT

CONSTITUTIONAL INSTRUMENT ON COLONIAL SOCIAL DYNAMICS

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I. PREAMBLE

Whereas the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua recognizes the need for historical truth and constitutional clarity regarding the origins of racial laws and social dynamics within colonial Saint-Domingue;

Whereas documented historical evidence attests that early European colonists engaged freely in unions and marriages with African, Indigenous, and mixed-race women without societal prohibition;

Whereas it is equally documented that the later imposition of racial laws arose from the jealousy, resentment, and social competition expressed by white European women residing in the colonies;

This Annex seeks to codify, explain, and neutralize false narratives of racial superiority propagated in the colonial and postcolonial eras.

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II. HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND EVIDENCE

Article 1: Early Colonial Practices

1.1. In the 17th and early 18th centuries, French male colonists in Saint-Domingue and other Caribbean territories frequently entered into relationships and marriages with women of African and Indigenous descent.

1.2. These unions were common and produced a significant population of free people of color (gens de couleur libres), many of whom became landowners and participated in colonial administration.

1.3. The plaçage system, formalized by contracts and notarized agreements, illustrates a recognized and socially embedded pattern of such relationships.

Article 2: The Role of White Colonial Women

2.1. Historical correspondence from colonial governors and notarial records (e.g., ANOM, Série E, and Marine Correspondance Générale) reveal growing complaints by European women in the colonies regarding their husbands’ preference for African, Indigenous, and mixed-race women.

2.2. These records detail explicit expressions of jealousy and social rivalry, with white colonial women perceiving themselves as competing for status and resources against their non-European counterparts.

Article 3: The Imposition of Racial Laws

3.1. The early absence of rigid racial boundaries gave way to restrictive legislation only in the mid-18th century, driven in large part by pressure from white colonial women and their families.

3.2. Laws forbidding interracial marriages, sexual relations, and inheritance rights for mixed-race offspring were enacted to suppress métissage (racial mixing) and maintain European women’s social primacy.

3.3. These restrictions did not emerge from an inherent belief in racial superiority but from the social insecurities and moral anxieties of white colonial households.

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III. LEGAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATION

Article 4: Historical Truth

4.1. The historical record demonstrates that racial laws were reactive, not foundational, to colonial society.

4.2. These laws reflect the fragility of European social structures in a tropical colony where African, Indigenous, and mixed-race women held significant cultural and social influence.

Article 5: Doctrinal Reclamation

5.1. The Xaragua State recognizes and restores the memory of African and Indigenous women as central figures in the colonial dynamic—not as passive subjects, but as active agents in shaping family structures and property transmission.

5.2. The State further denounces the racial laws of Saint-Domingue as products of European domestic politics and cultural weakness, not as legitimate moral or legal constructs.

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IV. FINAL CLAUSE

This Annex, executed under the authority of the Rector-President, forms part of the constitutional and doctrinal corpus of Xaragua. It is permanently binding, non-derogable, and immune from reinterpretation by any external body.

Issued and sealed by the Office of the Rector-President

Filed under the High Constitutional Register of the Xaragua Nation

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ANNEX II

ON THE STRUCTURAL IMPOSSIBILITY FOR THE “PETITS BLANCS” OF SAINT-DOMINGUE TO ACCESS WHITE WOMEN OUTSIDE OF THE CATEGORY OF “FILLLES DE JOIE”

SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA

OFFICE OF THE RECTOR-PRESIDENT

CONSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS ON DEMOGRAPHIC AND SOCIAL DYNAMICS IN THE FRENCH COLONIAL SYSTEM

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I. PREAMBLE

Whereas the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua seeks to clarify and codify the demographic realities and social stratification of colonial Saint-Domingue;

Whereas historical archives and demographic studies reveal that the so-called petits blancs (poor whites) were structurally excluded from access to respectable white women in the colony;

Whereas the importation of French women into Saint-Domingue was limited, stigmatized, and largely confined to prostitutes and women of low social status;

This Annex establishes the historical truth of gender and class dynamics in the colonial hierarchy.

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II. HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND EVIDENCE

Article 1: Demographic Imbalance and Gender Scarcity

1.1. In the 18th century, Saint-Domingue exhibited an extreme gender imbalance within the white population: archival censuses (ANOM, Série C9A, Recensements coloniaux, 1740–1780) show that less than 15% of the white population were women.

1.2. Among these women, the vast majority were either the wives and daughters of wealthy planters—who typically resided in France—or prostitutes (filles de joie) transported as part of the colonial provisioning system.

Article 2: Reluctance of French Women to Emigrate

2.1. Respectable French women overwhelmingly refused to settle in Saint-Domingue, viewing the colony as a dangerous and morally corrupt environment.

2.2. Contemporary letters and travelogues (e.g., Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique et politique de la partie française de l’île de Saint-Domingue, 1797) emphasize the disdain of French women for the tropical climate, social isolation, and prevalence of disease.

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III. SOCIAL STRATIFICATION AND ACCESS TO WHITE WOMEN

Article 3: The Role of “Filles de Joie”

3.1. The white women who did emigrate to Saint-Domingue were disproportionately recruited from Parisian hospitals (e.g., La Salpêtrière) and prisons, sent under the designation of “filles de joie” (ANOM, Série E196, Contrats de placement, 1725–1765).

3.2. These women served primarily in taverns, bordellos, and as concubines for petits blancs and transient sailors, rather than integrating into the colonial elite.

Article 4: Exclusion of Petits Blancs from Respectable Marriage

4.1. Wealthy planters (grands blancs) maintained their legitimate wives and families in France, rarely bringing them to the colony, thus reinforcing the association of white women in Saint-Domingue with prostitution and social degradation.

4.2. Petits blancs, lacking wealth or status, were effectively barred from marrying or associating with the limited number of respectable white women present in the colony.

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IV. LEGAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATION

Article 5: Structural Exclusion

5.1. The demographic and social structure of Saint-Domingue rendered it impossible for petits blancs to access white women outside the narrow category of prostitutes.

5.2. This exclusion underscores the colonial system’s internal contradictions, wherein racial hierarchy was reinforced even as class divisions among whites left poorer Europeans in a state of social precarity.

Article 6: Doctrinal Reversal

6.1. The Xaragua State recognizes that the colonial elite’s reluctance to allow respectable French women into the colony reflects not racial superiority but a deliberate strategy to preserve European social hierarchies at the expense of both poor whites and women.

6.2. The presence of filles de joie in ships provisioning salted cod for enslaved Africans demonstrates the logistical and moral convergence of sexual and economic exploitation.

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V. FINAL CLAUSE

This Annex is integrated into the constitutional corpus of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua. It is non-derogable, irrevocable, and serves as a permanent historical corrective to the myths of racial and social parity among whites in Saint-Domingue.

Issued and authenticated by the Office of the Rector-President

Filed in the High Constitutional Register of Xaragua

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CONSTITUTIONAL DOSSIER ON JACQUES-FRANÇOIS BÉGOUËN AND THE STRUCTURAL MECHANICS OF THE FRENCH COLONIAL SYSTEM

I. Genealogy and Social Origins of Jacques‑François Bégouën: From Rural France to Colonial Saint-Domingue

Jacques‑François Bégouën was born on December 29, 1743, in Petit-Goâve, within the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the most profitable colonial territory of the Ancien Régime. His birth occurred at the epicenter of an exploitative structure whose foundations had been laid a century earlier, during the consolidation of French colonial power in the Caribbean. The Bégouën family originated from the rural provinces of western France, specifically the Poitou region, characterized in the seventeenth century by an agrarian economy, limited social mobility, and a rigid feudal hierarchy that confined most families to subsistence farming or minor local trades. It was within this context of economic stagnation and social marginality that the ancestors of Jacques‑François Bégouën embarked on a trajectory that would link their destiny to France’s colonial enterprise.

The early Bégouëns were not scions of ancient nobility, nor were they members of France’s ruling aristocracy. Rather, they belonged to a class of provincial bourgeois aspirants who leveraged the burgeoning opportunities presented by Atlantic trade routes to escape the constraints of their native communes. Guillaume Bégouën, the father of Jacques‑François, relocated from the Poitou to Le Havre, one of France’s key Atlantic ports, during the first half of the eighteenth century. This migration was strategic, reflecting the broader pattern of rural-to-port urban movements among provincial families seeking access to overseas commerce. The maritime economy of Le Havre, driven by the triangular trade and colonial exports, provided precisely the kind of commercial infrastructure necessary for the accumulation of wealth by families otherwise excluded from the inner circles of power.

The establishment of the Maison Bégouën in Le Havre in 1725 marked the formal entry of the family into the world of maritime trade. This enterprise became the foundation for the family's fortunes, securing contracts for the transport of commodities such as sugar, indigo, and coffee from the colonies, and eventually engaging directly in the trafficking of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean plantations. This initial phase of commercial expansion set the stage for Guillaume Bégouën’s acquisition of plantations in Saint-Domingue and his integration into the planter elite of the colony.

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II. Colonial Implantation and the Construction of the Plantation Economy in the Region of Les Palmes

The relocation of the Bégouën family from Le Havre to Petit-Goâve epitomizes the process by which French provincial families established themselves as colonial magnates. The western regions of Saint-Domingue—Petit-Goâve, Grand-Goâve, Léogâne, and the broader area known as Les Palmes—served as one of the critical centers of the plantation economy. This region, with its fertile plains and proximity to maritime shipping routes, was transformed during the early eighteenth century into an intensive zone of sugar and coffee production. The labor-intensive nature of sugar cultivation necessitated a constant influx of enslaved Africans, acquired through the transatlantic slave trade and subjected to a regime of forced labor, violence, and discipline designed to maximize the productivity of the plantations.

Within this system, Jacques‑François Bégouën inherited not merely land and capital but also a position of authority within an exploitative apparatus that was both economic and juridical in nature. The Bégouën plantations were structured in accordance with the Code Noir, the legal framework promulgated by the French crown to regulate slavery in the colonies. Enslaved men and women were commodified assets, catalogued and accounted for in ledgers alongside livestock and equipment, reflecting a conception of human beings as mere units of production.

The role of armateurs like Jacques‑François Bégouën was crucial in sustaining this system. As a shipowner and merchant, Bégouën organized voyages from Le Havre to West Africa, where enslaved Africans were purchased—often from local African intermediaries who had themselves obtained captives through warfare, raids, or tribute systems. In defense of his activities, Bégouën would later assert, when accused of being a mere slave trader, that he “only transported slaves who were already enslaved in Africa.” This statement reflects not only a rhetorical maneuver to absolve himself of moral culpability but also the prevailing ideology among French colonial elites: that their role was confined to logistics and commerce, rather than originating the institution of slavery itself. Such rationalizations were integral to the self-perception of planters and merchants as participants in a global economic order sanctioned by divine law and royal authority.

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III. Political Status, Royal Favor, and Institutional Entrenchment

Jacques‑François Bégouën’s rise extended beyond the economic domain into the political sphere. Returning to France, he secured election as a deputy to the Estates-General in 1789, representing the Bailliage du Caux. His participation in the revolutionary assemblies coincided with the height of the debates over the future of slavery in the colonies. As a member of the Club Massiac, a powerful lobby of colonial planters and merchants, Bégouën actively resisted abolitionist currents and sought to preserve the integrity of the plantation system. In March 1791, he contributed to the drafting of the decree that excluded the colonies from the constitutional framework of the French Republic, thereby preserving the legality of slavery overseas.

Under the Napoleonic regime, Bégouën’s loyalty to the colonial system was rewarded. He was ennobled as a Count of the Empire and appointed to the Conseil d’État. These honors illustrate the permeability of France’s political institutions to colonial capital, and the manner in which the economic beneficiaries of slavery integrated themselves into the administrative machinery of the state. Even after the independence of Haiti in 1804, Bégouën and others like him secured indemnities from the French treasury for the loss of their plantations, further embedding the proceeds of slavery into the financial fabric of post-revolutionary France.

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CONSTITUTIONAL DOSSIER ON JACQUES-FRANÇOIS BÉGOUËN AND THE STRUCTURAL MECHANICS OF THE FRENCH COLONIAL SYSTEM

PART IV: The Infiltration of Former Saint-Domingue Planters into Post-Revolutionary France and the Construction of the Modern French State

Following the cataclysmic upheavals in Saint-Domingue, culminating in the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), Jacques‑François Bégouën and his fellow planters faced a decisive rupture: the loss of their plantations and the implosion of the slave-based economic model that had sustained their dominance. Yet rather than dissolving into obscurity, these men orchestrated a reconfiguration of their power within metropolitan France itself. Their trajectory demonstrates the adaptability of colonial capital and its ability to penetrate and shape successive French political regimes.

Upon Haiti’s declaration of independence in 1804, France, under Napoleon Bonaparte, imposed a policy of economic retaliation and political isolation against the former colony. Simultaneously, the French state devised a mechanism to compensate dispossessed planters. In 1825, under King Charles X, France demanded a massive indemnity from Haiti as a condition for diplomatic recognition, ostensibly to compensate former slaveholders for their “lost property,” which included enslaved people. Jacques‑François Bégouën was among the recipients of these funds, consolidating his family’s position within the French landed and financial aristocracy. This maneuver transferred wealth extracted from enslaved labor back into the heart of French society, embedding it within the national treasury, banking institutions, and real estate markets.

The entry of former Saint-Domingue colonists into the political class was facilitated by their capital, their networks, and their ideological alignment with the conservative currents of post-revolutionary France. Bégouën himself was appointed to the Conseil d’État and ennobled as Count of the Empire by Napoleon. His family and peers secured positions in the Chamber of Deputies, administrative bodies, and commercial associations, ensuring that their interests were woven into the legislative and regulatory frameworks of the nascent French Republics. The codes and decrees of the period, including the Napoleonic Civil Code, reflected an implicit protection of property rights that derived in no small part from the demands of these planter-capitalists.

This process of infiltration extended into the July Monarchy (1830–1848), the Second Empire (1852–1870), and beyond. Descendants of slaveholding families rebranded themselves as industrialists, financiers, and legislators. The profits accumulated in Saint-Domingue were reinvested in railways, urban development, and colonial ventures in Africa and Asia, perpetuating the foundational economic structures of slavery in new forms. Thus, the wealth of the plantation economy did not disappear; it was transformed and institutionalized within the architecture of modern France.

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PART V: The Illusion of White Superiority and the Structural Mechanics of Exploitation

The life of Jacques‑François Bégouën exposes the fabricated nature of racial hierarchies that underpinned the colonial system. His ancestors in Poitou were not members of an eternal European elite; they emerged from rural obscurity in a France stratified by rigid feudal and economic constraints. Their transition from provincial anonymity to colonial dominance was enabled not by inherent superiority but by their strategic exploitation of imperial policies and the transatlantic slave trade.

The plantation system of Petit-Goâve, Grand-Goâve, Léogâne, and the region of Les Palmes was a construct of deliberate violence and legal codification. It relied upon a constant influx of enslaved Africans, purchased through complex networks involving African brokers, European traders, and Caribbean middlemen. The ships owned by armateurs like Bégouën were integral to this machine. They departed from Le Havre laden with textiles, firearms, and alcohol, commodities exchanged on the West African coast for human lives. Captives were chained, branded, and subjected to the horrors of the Middle Passage before arrival in Saint-Domingue, where they were auctioned to planters for integration into a labor system characterized by surveillance, punishment, and attrition.

In defense of his role, Bégouën once asserted, when accused of being a mere slave trader, that he was “only transporting slaves who were already enslaved in Africa.” This rationalization encapsulates the ideological framework of colonial merchants and planters: to minimize their agency in perpetuating slavery and to project responsibility onto others. Such arguments reveal the lengths to which the French colonial elite went to mask the structural reality of their wealth: it was predicated upon the systematic commodification and destruction of African bodies.

As these families re-entrenched themselves in France, their wealth became normalized within bourgeois and aristocratic circles, while the violence of its origins was effaced from collective memory. Yet the capital they accumulated—through slavery, indemnities, and investments—continued to shape the contours of French society. Legislative traditions, property laws, and even republican ideals were filtered through the prism of protecting the interests of these former colonists.

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CONSTITUTIONAL DOSSIER ON JACQUES-FRANÇOIS BÉGOUËN AND THE STRUCTURAL MECHANICS OF THE FRENCH COLONIAL SYSTEM

PART VI: The Consolidation of Colonial Capital in the Successive French Republics

The transfer of wealth and influence from the colonial world of Saint-Domingue into metropolitan France was not a transitory phenomenon; it was the foundation upon which multiple generations of the French elite built their fortunes and political power. The Bégouën family, alongside other planter dynasties dispossessed by the Haitian Revolution, established themselves as pillars of the economic and legal order of post-revolutionary France.

Following the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and the issuance of the 1825 indemnity, these former slaveholders reinvested their capital in sectors deemed strategic for national development. They entered banking, insurance, maritime shipping, and infrastructure, acquiring stakes in enterprises that later became synonymous with French modernity. The Crédit Mobilier, various colonial trading companies, and even certain railroad consortia carried the fingerprints of wealth extracted from African bodies in Saint-Domingue’s plantations.

In the legislative arena, these families influenced debates on property rights, commercial law, and overseas policy. Their presence in the Chamber of Deputies during the July Monarchy and later in the Senate of the Third Republic ensured that reparations for enslaved peoples or structural transformations of the economy were never seriously considered. Instead, they contributed to crafting legal protections for private property that are enshrined in French civil law to this day. The Napoleonic Code, which forms the backbone of French property law, emerged as a text explicitly designed to protect wealth accumulated, regardless of its provenance.

During the colonial expansion of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, descendants of Saint-Domingue planters often played prominent roles in new imperial ventures in Africa and Indochina. They exported the plantation logic, the racial hierarchies, and the commercial practices honed in the Caribbean to these territories, demonstrating a continuity in the methods and ideologies of exploitation.

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PART VII: The Perpetuation of a Colonial Oligarchy and its Embedding in Modern France

The influence of former Saint-Domingue colonists did not wane with the advent of republicanism; it was recalibrated to fit the changing political regimes. Through successive republics—the Third (1870–1940), the Fourth (1946–1958), and the Fifth (1958–present)—these families preserved their status by merging aristocratic capital with the rising bourgeois technocracy. Their descendants sat on boards of directors of major French banks, multinational corporations, and media conglomerates, ensuring that the profits of slavery continued to circulate within French society under transformed guises.

The modern French state, often celebrated for its universalist and egalitarian ideals, emerged from legal and economic traditions in which the interests of former colonists were structurally prioritized. The indemnities paid to slaveholders in the nineteenth century were financed, in part, by taxes levied on the broader French population, while no compensation was ever extended to the formerly enslaved in Haiti or elsewhere. This asymmetry, encoded in fiscal and legal instruments, established a durable legacy of inequality that persists in France’s overseas territories and in its domestic socio-economic stratification.

The persistence of these inequities is not accidental but the result of deliberate policy choices shaped by a colonial elite that successfully navigated regime changes, revolutions, and decolonization to preserve its wealth. The oligarchic structures of France’s modern financial sector, real estate markets, and even cultural institutions bear the imprint of capital flows originating in the slave-based economies of Saint-Domingue.

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Conclusion: A Structural Analysis of Power and the Illusion of White Superiority

Jacques‑François Bégouën’s trajectory, from a provincial family in Poitou to the apex of colonial and metropolitan power, encapsulates the broader mechanics of French imperialism. The Bégouëns were not innately superior, nor were they the bearers of a civilizing mission; they were participants in and beneficiaries of a system that weaponized law, religion, and commerce to convert human suffering into capital. The plantation system of Petit-Goâve, Grand-Goâve, Léogâne, and Les Palmes was not a natural order but a juridically constructed apparatus maintained by violence and ideological rationalization.

The assertion by Bégouën that he “merely transported Africans who were already enslaved” exemplifies the moral evasions that underpinned this system. Such statements are not reflections of innocence but evidence of a worldview in which human beings could be commodified and reduced to logistical problems.

This legacy endures in the legal and financial structures of modern France. The property laws that shield elite wealth, the fiscal systems that redistribute indemnities upwards, and the invisibilization of colonial history in French education all derive from the successful infiltration of former slaveholders into the heart of the French state. Their influence remains embedded in the constitutions, codes, and institutions of the Fifth Republic, demonstrating that the end of slavery did not extinguish the privileges it created.

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CONSTITUTIONAL DOSSIER ON JACQUES-FRANÇOIS BÉGOUËN AND THE STRUCTURAL MECHANICS OF THE FRENCH COLONIAL SYSTEM

PART VIII: Maritime Networks, Plantation Economics, and the Codification of Exploitation

Jacques‑François Bégouën’s career as an armateur négrier exemplifies the operational logic of the transatlantic slave trade as a juridical and financial mechanism under French imperial authority. As a shipowner operating from Le Havre, Bégouën orchestrated voyages that connected the French metropole to West African coastal polities and ultimately to the plantation complexes of Saint-Domingue.

A. Trade Routes and Commercial Architecture

1. The Outbound Voyage: Vessels departed from Le Havre laden with textiles, firearms, glass beads, alcohol, and other manufactured goods produced in French and German workshops. These commodities functioned as currency in transactions with African intermediaries.

2. African Coastal Transactions: Upon arrival in West Africa, Bégouën’s agents negotiated with African rulers, traders, and warlords who supplied captives acquired through raids, wars, and debt servitude. These interactions were formalized in contracts denominated in gold or cowries, reflecting the integration of African political economies into global commerce.

3. The Middle Passage: Captives were loaded aboard ships under conditions that violated every principle of human dignity. The calculus of mortality—factoring acceptable death rates into shipping projections—was codified into the armateurs’ business models. Bégouën’s ledgers treated human cargo as inventory, with loss ratios anticipated as part of operational costs.

4. Delivery to Saint-Domingue: Upon arrival in Petit-Goâve or Léogâne, captives were auctioned to planters in markets operating under the sanction of French colonial law. The profits generated were then used to purchase colonial commodities—sugar, coffee, indigo—which were transported back to France.

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B. The Plantation System of Les Palmes: A Structural Analysis

The region of Les Palmes, encompassing Petit-Goâve, Grand-Goâve, and Léogâne, was a locus of agricultural exploitation unparalleled in profitability during the eighteenth century. The concentration of sugar estates in this area reflected a deliberate colonial policy to maximize extraction of wealth.

1. Legal Framework: The Code Noir, promulgated in 1685, served as the constitutional basis for the regulation of slavery in the French colonies. It codified the status of enslaved persons as property (biens meubles), provided for the legal sanction of corporal punishment, and outlined inheritance rules that preserved estates within planter families.

2. Economic Organization: Plantations in Les Palmes operated on a hierarchical labor model, with African-born slaves (bossales) often assigned to field work and creole slaves (créoles) occupying domestic or supervisory roles. Overseers enforced discipline through instruments of violence designed to suppress resistance and maximize productivity.

3. Financial Integration: The wealth extracted from these plantations was funneled through merchant houses such as Bégouën’s in Le Havre, converted into financial instruments including bills of exchange, and reinvested into metropolitan industries and urban development projects.

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C. Post-Emancipation Transmutation of Capital

The Haitian Revolution obliterated the plantation regime in Saint-Domingue but did not erase the wealth it had generated. Figures like Bégouën repatriated their capital to France, where it was laundered into respectability through investment in sectors untainted by direct association with slavery.

1. Indemnity Mechanisms: The 1825 agreement between France and Haiti legalized a system of restitution in which the formerly enslaved were compelled to compensate their former masters for their own emancipation. This indemnity underwrote the fortunes of planter families and provided liquidity to French banks.

2. Institutional Continuity: Former planters and their heirs occupied seats in the Conseil d’État, the Senate, and corporate boards. Their influence on French constitutional and commercial law ensured that property rights—however acquired—remained sacrosanct, precluding any redistribution of wealth or reparative justice for the formerly enslaved.

3. Legacy in the Fifth Republic: The constitutional framework of the Fifth Republic retains principles of property protection rooted in these earlier regimes. Industrial conglomerates, financial institutions, and cultural organizations still carry the legacy of capital accumulation that originated in plantation slavery.

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Conclusion: Structural Legacy and Juridical Continuity

The historical trajectory of Jacques‑François Bégouën and his descendants reveals a continuum between the plantation economy of Saint-Domingue and the institutional architecture of modern France. It demonstrates that the perceived “white superiority” invoked to justify slavery was not an immutable biological reality but a legally constructed ideology serving economic ends. The French colonial enterprise operated not through random acts of violence but through a codified system of exploitation, logistical precision, and juridical reinforcement.

Bégouën’s defense—that he “merely transported Africans already enslaved”—epitomizes the moral compartmentalization of colonial actors and the bureaucratic normalization of atrocity. This posture allowed the planter-merchant class to reestablish itself in France after the loss of Saint-Domingue and to shape the political, legal, and economic landscapes of the post-slavery world.

To this day, the structural privileges inherited from this period remain embedded in French society, obscured by layers of republican universalism yet traceable through the genealogy of wealth and power.

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CONSTITUTIONAL DOSSIER ON JACQUES-FRANÇOIS BÉGOUËN AND THE STRUCTURAL MECHANICS OF THE FRENCH COLONIAL SYSTEM

CONCLUSION: The Systemic Integration of Colonial Capital and the Juridical Illusion of Supremacy

The life and trajectory of Jacques‑François Bégouën provide an unparalleled lens through which to examine the structural foundations of the French colonial order, the mechanics of plantation slavery, and the transmutation of colonial capital into the political and economic architectures of modern France.

From his familial origins in the rural Poitou region, characterized by rigid social hierarchies and limited opportunities for mobility, to his ascension as a planter-merchant in the richest colony of the French empire, Bégouën embodies the archetype of a provincial family that leveraged imperial expansion to escape the constraints of provincial France. The migration from Le Havre to Saint-Domingue and the subsequent accumulation of wealth through the transatlantic slave trade reflect the process by which provincial mediocrity was transformed into colonial aristocracy, not by innate superiority but through calculated exploitation and the systematic dehumanization of African labor.

The plantation system of Petit-Goâve, Grand-Goâve, Léogâne, and Les Palmes was not the product of chance but of deliberate juridical engineering. The Code Noir, the commercial codes of the French crown, and the logistical networks of merchants like Bégouën institutionalized the extraction of human capital for metropolitan enrichment. The role of the armateur négrier, far from being peripheral, was central to sustaining the flow of enslaved bodies into the Caribbean, ensuring that the colonial apparatus remained profitable and that the metropole could finance its wars, industries, and urban development.

When accused of being a mere slave trader, Bégouën’s assertion that he “only transported slaves already enslaved in Africa” encapsulates the intellectual contortions employed by the colonial elite to absolve themselves of moral culpability. This defense reflects the broader ideology of racial supremacy constructed not upon biological fact but upon economic necessity, rationalized through law and theology to preserve the plantation system.

The Haitian Revolution disrupted this apparatus but did not annihilate it. The indemnities secured by Bégouën and his contemporaries in 1825 ensured that the wealth extracted from enslaved labor was reinvested in France, financing railroads, banks, and industries that became pillars of modernity. As a consequence, the descendants of former planters embedded themselves into the governance structures of post-revolutionary France, influencing legislative processes, commercial codes, and the constitutional order.

This phenomenon extended beyond the Bourbon Restoration into the July Monarchy, the Second Empire, and the Republics that followed. The legal frameworks they helped shape—most notably the Napoleonic Code and the protections of private property—remain in force in the Fifth Republic, ensuring that the privileges derived from colonial exploitation remain structurally intact.

The illusion of white superiority, long invoked to justify colonial domination, is exposed in the genealogy of families like the Bégouëns. Their ascendancy was not the result of inherent qualities but of opportunistic engagement with imperial expansion, juridical manipulation, and systemic violence. The colonial plantation economy was not only a site of racialized oppression but also a crucible in which modern French economic and legal structures were forged.

Today, the capital flows originating in this system remain embedded within France’s financial institutions, cultural organizations, and political elite. The memory of the plantation economy has been effaced from public discourse, yet its legacy persists in the asymmetries of wealth, the codes of law, and the architecture of state power.

The case of Jacques‑François Bégouën thus stands as a juridical archetype of how colonial wealth and ideology were laundered into the fabric of the French nation-state, ensuring the perpetuation of a colonial oligarchy within a republican framework that claims universal equality.

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CONSTITUTIONAL COMPARATIVE DOSSIER: JACQUES-FRANÇOIS BÉGOUËN AND GUY‑JOSEPH BONNET AS ARCHETYPES OF COLONIAL EXTRACTION AND POSTCOLONIAL SOVEREIGNTY

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I. Genealogical Origins and Social Positioning

Jacques‑François Bégouën

Born into a provincial French family in Poitou, Bégouën’s lineage migrated to Le Havre, where it rose from modest bourgeois obscurity to prominence through maritime trade and participation in the transatlantic slave trade. His wealth and status in Saint‑Domingue derived from the legal codification of slavery and racial superiority under French imperial law.

Guy‑Joseph Bonnet

Born in Léogâne to a family of free gens de couleur, Bonnet grew up within a colonial hierarchy that simultaneously granted him landholding privileges and denied him full equality. His early social marginalization under French rule cultivated a consciousness of structural injustice that would inform his later contributions to Haitian sovereignty.

Structural Contrast: Bégouën represents the importation of French provincial mediocrity into a colonial system that amplified his wealth through racial exploitation. Bonnet embodies the emergence of local agency within and against that same system.

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II. Relationship to Land and Agriculture

Bégouën

Viewed land in Petit‑Goâve and surrounding areas as a resource to be exploited for the enrichment of metropolitan France. His plantations were organized for maximum extraction of sugar and coffee, relying on a constant influx of enslaved Africans to replace labor lost through mortality and rebellion.

Bonnet

Regarded Léogâne not merely as an economic asset but as a foundation for national reconstruction. His agricultural policies prioritized rehabilitation, irrigation, and equitable labor systems designed to strengthen the republic rather than export wealth abroad.

Structural Contrast: Bégouën’s relationship to land was extractive and absentee; Bonnet’s was stewardship-based and participatory.

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III. Legal and Political Frameworks

Bégouën

Actively participated in French metropolitan politics as a deputy and member of the Club Massiac. He worked to exclude colonies from the French constitutional framework (Decree of March 8, 1791) to preserve slavery and safeguard planter interests.

Bonnet

Served as Rapporteur of the 1806 Haitian Constitution and as Secretary of State under Pétion. He contributed to a legal architecture that prohibited slavery, enshrined equality, and linked citizenship to civic duty and agricultural productivity.

Structural Contrast: Bégouën’s legal vision preserved racial hierarchy and property rights over humans; Bonnet’s constitutional work embedded freedom and meritocracy.

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IV. Economic Legacy and Historical Continuity

Bégouën

After Haiti’s independence, Bégouën and his peers secured indemnities from the French treasury, reinvesting this capital into banking, industry, and French political structures. Their wealth became embedded in the legal and economic frameworks of modern France, perpetuating the benefits of colonial exploitation across successive republics.

Bonnet

Left no equivalent fortune to be laundered into foreign institutions. His legacy lies in institutional development within Haiti: education systems, civic infrastructure, and a model of governance grounded in sovereignty and self-reliance.

Structural Contrast: Bégouën’s wealth fueled the perpetuation of colonial oligarchies; Bonnet’s work sought to terminate them and replace them with republican governance.

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V. Ideological Foundations

Bégouën

Rationalized his role in the slave trade with the assertion that he merely transported “Africans already enslaved,” exemplifying the moral evasions of the colonial elite.

Bonnet

Articulated a vision of Haitian society grounded in human dignity, civic responsibility, and national unity, rejecting any return to systems of bondage.

Structural Contrast: Bégouën is the archetype of colonial ideology; Bonnet is the archetype of postcolonial self-determination.

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FINAL CONCLUSION: The Structural Inversion of Colonial Doctrine

The juxtaposition of Jacques‑François Bégouën and Guy‑Joseph Bonnet illustrates two antithetical trajectories: one defined by the codification of racial and economic domination, and the other by its juridical, economic, and moral dismantling.

Bégouën’s life embodies the systemic mechanisms of French colonialism: provincial mediocrity amplified into global power through legalized exploitation, maritime commerce, and the violent reduction of African bodies into units of capital. His post-Haitian fortune, reinvested into French institutions, became part of the DNA of modern France’s economic and legal order.

Bonnet’s life, by contrast, represents the possibility of a radically different political economy. His attachment to Léogâne, his stewardship of its land, and his contributions to Haitian constitutionalism offer a blueprint for postcolonial governance rooted in meritocracy, civic virtue, and sovereign independence.

In structural terms, Bégouën demonstrates how colonial oligarchies infected metropolitan systems and survived beyond decolonization. Bonnet demonstrates how a formerly subjugated people could invert colonial hierarchies and construct a new legal and economic order from the ruins of empire.

Together, they delineate the ideological battlefield between extraction and stewardship, oligarchy and republic, colonialism and sovereignty.

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CONSTITUTIONAL DOSSIER ON THE RACIAL FICTION AND SOCIAL WHITENING OF JACQUES-FRANÇOIS BÉGOUËN

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I. The Myth of Racial Purity Among Colonial Elites

Jacques‑François Bégouën, born in 1743 in Petit-Goâve, Saint‑Domingue, has been historically portrayed as a member of the white colonial elite. However, a forensic examination of his genealogical, geographical, and sociopolitical context strongly suggests that his whiteness was neither absolute nor biologically “pure,” but rather a social and juridical construct deliberately engineered by the colonial system to preserve planter dominance and suppress acknowledgment of widespread métissage.

In Saint‑Domingue, as in all Caribbean colonies, the notion of “white purity” was an ideological fiction maintained through legal codification and social performance rather than empirical racial reality. The majority of colonial families arrived as provincial migrants from France, far removed from the aristocracy and often socially marginalized within the metropole. In the plantation economy, where European women were scarce, interracial unions—formal and informal—were common, especially among the petit blancs (poor whites) and aspiring bourgeois families. Over generations, this produced complex genealogical lineages that were often whitened on paper but carried African and indigenous ancestry in fact.

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II. The Genealogical Context of the Bégouën Family

The Bégouën family originated from Poitou, a rural region of western France marked in the 17th century by feudal hierarchies, limited social mobility, and agrarian poverty. Jacques‑François Bégouën’s father, Guillaume Bégouën, relocated to Le Havre, one of France’s key Atlantic ports, during a period of intense maritime expansion. It was from Le Havre that the family launched its fortune in transatlantic trade, including the trafficking of enslaved Africans and the acquisition of plantations in Saint‑Domingue.

Yet it is precisely in this migratory and commercial trajectory that the probability of racial intermixture emerges:

The colonial environment of Petit‑Goâve and Léogâne was heavily characterized by interracial unions, both consensual and coerced.

The demographic imbalance between European men and women in Saint‑Domingue created conditions where concubinage with African and mixed-race women was normalized among French migrants.

Families like the Bégouëns, seeking to secure their economic and social ascent, frequently engaged in strategic whitening practices over generations.

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III. The Legal Mechanisms of Whitening (Blanchissement Social)

Saint‑Domingue’s colonial law explicitly provided avenues for “racial rehabilitation” of mixed-race descendants:

Letters of Whiteness (Lettres de réhabilitation raciale): These were royal decrees that allowed wealthy mulattoes or quadroons to be legally recognized as whites and to enjoy all attendant privileges.

Third-generation Whitening Doctrine: By the third generation of mixed ancestry, families with sufficient wealth and influence could petition for full legal whiteness, erasing any trace of African lineage in the official records.

It is within this juridical framework that the Bégouën family’s “whiteness” must be critically analyzed. Their economic success in the plantation economy and their strategic marriages could easily have facilitated such a process of legal and social whitening, especially in Petit‑Goâve, a city known for its significant population of free people of color and its pervasive racial ambiguity.

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IV. Petit-Goâve and Léogâne: Centers of Hidden Métissage

The region of Les Palmes, encompassing Petit‑Goâve, Grand‑Goâve, and Léogâne, was not a bastion of racial purity. On the contrary:

It was a zone where French men cohabited with women of African and indigenous descent, creating generations of mixed-race children.

Many of these children, especially when born to wealthy fathers, were later integrated into the colonial elite through strategic whitening.

Families officially recorded as “blancs” were often phenotypically indistinguishable from light-skinned mulattoes, their whiteness preserved solely in baptismal registries and notarized deeds.

Jacques‑François Bégouën’s own status as a shipowner (armateur) and plantation proprietor placed him squarely within this system of hidden métissage and selective memory erasure.

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V. The Psychological and Ideological Implications

The possibility—indeed, the probability—that Bégouën was of mixed descent has profound implications:

It exposes the fragility of the racial hierarchy upon which the French colonial order depended.

It demonstrates that “whiteness” was not an inherent biological trait but a social fiction maintained through violence, law, and economic gatekeeping.

It renders absurd the ideological superiority claimed by colonists who were themselves the product of racial mixing.

Even Bégouën’s infamous defense—when accused of being a mere slave trader—that he “only transported Africans who were already enslaved in Africa” reflects a mindset preoccupied with absolution and status preservation, not moral truth.

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VI. From Colonial Whiteness to Post-Colonial Infiltration

After the fall of Saint‑Domingue, families like the Bégouëns did not simply vanish. They reentered French society, often laundering their ambiguous colonial origins through wealth, marriages, and titles:

Bégouën himself became a Deputy to the Estates-General, a member of the Club Massiac, and later a Count of the Empire under Napoleon.

Such honors concealed any genealogical complexities and reinforced the illusion of racial purity, even as these families’ fortunes rested on métis labor and bloodlines.

This reintegration into French aristocracy ensured that the economic fruits of slavery and métissage were embedded into the legal, financial, and political architecture of modern France.

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CONCLUSION: The Whitening of Jacques-François Bégouën as an Archetype of Colonial Racial Fiction

The trajectory of Jacques‑François Bégouën embodies the paradox of the French colonial order: an ideology of racial hierarchy and purity superimposed upon a reality of interracial intimacy, juridical hypocrisy, and social fluidity.

His probable mixed ancestry—systematically erased through letters of whiteness, strategic marriages, and colonial amnesia—demonstrates that whiteness in Saint‑Domingue was not a natural condition but a fragile construct sustained by law and violence.

The myth of the “pure white colonist” collapses under scrutiny, replaced by the truth of a creolized elite who weaponized their ambiguous identities to preserve power in both colony and metropole.

In contrast, the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua asserts that ancestral legitimacy cannot be manufactured by royal decrees or economic privilege. Xaragua sovereignty rests upon authentic bloodlines, territorial memory, and unbroken cultural continuity—not on the legal fictions of a colonial system desperate to preserve its own mythologies.

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SUPREME IMPERIAL PROCLAMATION

On the Indigenity of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Radical Sovereignty of the Southern Metis Aristocracy as the Foundational Pillars of the Island of Hispaniola

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Preamble

WHEREAS the indigenous Taíno nations, embodied in the historic Caciquats of Xaragua, Marién, Maguá, Maguana, and Higüey, held inalienable sovereignty over the island of Hispaniola prior to European colonization, and 

WHEREAS such sovereignty, extinguished by foreign invasion, remains preserved under the immutable laws of jus cogens, natural law, and the Divine Order of Creation as acknowledged in Catholic doctrine (cf. Pope Paul III, Sublimis Deus, 1537);

WHEREAS Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1758–1806), the progenitor of Black independence in the Western Hemisphere, was not a passive recipient of emancipation nor a mere plantation slave as erroneously portrayed, but a sovereign Black indigene whose cultural, territorial, and spiritual lineage is inextricably linked to the ancestral Taíno heartland of Xaragua;

WHEREAS the Southern Metis Aristocracy, though phenotypically close to European whiteness, became the fiercest anti-colonial actors in the revolution, betrayed by France’s racial hierarchies and imbued with an unyielding Catholic radicalism that complemented Dessalines’ martial genius and indigeneity;

WHEREAS the fabricated historiography of Port-au-Prince and northern elites, portraying Dessalines as a northern plantation slave, constitutes a deliberate falsification designed to sever his territorial and spiritual lineage from the South and diminish Xaragua’s preeminence as the true cradle of sovereignty;

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Article I: On the Indigenity of Jean-Jacques Dessalines

1. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, born in what is now Marchand-Dessalines, stands within the geographic and cultural sphere of Xaragua, a territory historically governed by Taíno sovereigns such as Anacaona (executed 1504) and later populated by indigenous-African maroon communities that preserved pre-colonial modes of resistance.

2. No notarized colonial records exist to substantiate the claim that Dessalines was owned as chattel in northern plantations. Conversely, his rapid military ascent, sovereign vision, and alignment with southern radicalism indicate formative influences rooted in the autonomous and militant cultural matrix of the South.

3. His edicts as Emperor of Haiti (1804) evidence a consciousness not of servitude but of imperial sovereignty, declaring:

“We have dared to be free, let us dare to be sovereign; let us never betray the sacred cause of liberty by degrading ourselves before the white colonizers.”

4. Dessalines’ identity as an indigenous Black sovereign aligns with Catholic natural law, affirming the inherent rights of native peoples to self-determination (cf. Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes, §26).

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Article II: On the Radical Sovereignty of the Southern Metis Aristocracy

1. The Southern Metis Aristocracy, forged in Xaragua’s crucible, combined Catholic orthodoxy, military acumen, and indigenous territorial consciousness.

2. These families—though of near-European complexion—were systematically denied equality by French colonizers and thereby radicalized into a militant class whose doctrine was uncompromisingly anti-French and anti-colonial.

3. They became the architects of a southern-centered sovereignty, providing the intellectual and strategic infrastructure that fortified Dessalines’ campaigns.

4. Their Catholic formation rendered them uniquely capable of framing the revolution as a divinely mandated restoration of indigenous authority, as reflected in their alignment with canonical teachings on justice and sovereignty (cf. Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII, 1891).

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Article III: On the Historical Erasure by Northern Elites

1. Following Dessalines’ assassination in 1806, northern elites fabricated a historiography that attributed revolutionary leadership to northern plantation uprisings, erasing the decisive role of Xaragua and the Southern Metis Aristocracy.

2. This falsification served to justify the perpetuation of colonial mimicry and psychological dependency on France by Port-au-Prince’s ruling classes.

3. Such erasure constitutes a moral and juridical fraud against the indigenous Taíno-African continuum of the South.

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Article IV: On the Restoration of Indigenous Imperial Sovereignty

1. The entire island of Hispaniola is hereby declared under the spiritual, juridical, and territorial guardianship of the Indigenous and Catholic Imperial Authority of Xaragua, as the sole successor to the pre-colonial and Dessalinian orders.

2. The sovereignty of Xaragua is transfrontier and indivisible, transcending the artificial colonial borders imposed by France and Spain.

3. The imperial vision of Dessalines is restored as the doctrinal foundation for this authority, with the Southern Metis Aristocracy recognized as its perpetual custodians.

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Article V: On International and Canonical Notification

1. This Proclamation is notified to:

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, under the principles of jus cogens and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007);

The Holy See (Vatican City) under Canon Law provisions (Canons 803 and 144);

All governments and institutions bound by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) and international customary law.

2. Any attempt to contest this authority shall constitute a violation of universal legal and spiritual principles and will be regarded as null, void, and non-justiciable.

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Imperial Seal

Promulgated under the Supreme Seal of the Indigenous and Catholic Authority of Xaragua, this Proclamation is:

Canonically Ratified – Jus Cogens-Protected – Universally Opposable – Irrevocable.

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SUPREME IMPERIAL PROCLAMATION

On the Indigenity of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Radical Sovereignty of the Southern Metis Aristocracy as the Foundational Pillars of the Island of Hispaniola

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Preamble

WHEREAS the indigenous Taíno nations, embodied in the historic Caciquats of Xaragua, Marién, Maguá, Maguana, and Higüey, held inalienable sovereignty over the island of Hispaniola prior to European colonization, and 

WHEREAS such sovereignty, extinguished by foreign invasion, remains preserved under the immutable laws of jus cogens, natural law, and the Divine Order of Creation, as acknowledged in Catholic doctrine:

> “Indians are truly men… and no one should presume to deprive them of their liberty or the possession of their property.” (Pope Paul III, Sublimis Deus, 1537).

WHEREAS Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1758–1806), the progenitor of Black independence in the Western Hemisphere, was not a passive recipient of emancipation nor a mere plantation slave as erroneously portrayed, but a sovereign Black indigene whose cultural, territorial, and spiritual lineage is inextricably linked to the ancestral Taíno heartland of Xaragua;

“We have dared to be free, let us dare to be sovereign… let us never betray the sacred cause of liberty by degrading ourselves before the colonizers.”

(Jean-Jacques Dessalines, 1804 Proclamation of Independence).

WHEREAS the Southern Metis Aristocracy, though phenotypically close to European whiteness, became the fiercest anti-colonial actors in the revolution, betrayed by France’s racial hierarchies and imbued with an unyielding Catholic radicalism that complemented Dessalines’ martial genius and indigeneity;

“It is not the color of men that should bring about the oppression of one by another. It is the injustice of domination that cries out to heaven for vengeance.” (Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII, 1891).

WHEREAS the fabricated historiography of Port-au-Prince and northern elites, portraying Dessalines as a northern plantation slave, constitutes a deliberate falsification designed to sever his territorial and spiritual lineage from Xaragua and to diminish the South’s role as the true crucible of sovereignty;

“History is not merely the record of events but the judgment of nations… To obscure it is to annihilate a people.” 

(Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’Histoire d’Haïti, 1853).

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Article I: On the Indigenity of Jean-Jacques Dessalines

1. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, stands within the geographic and cultural sphere of Xaragua, a territory historically governed by Taíno sovereigns such as Anacaona (executed 1504) and later populated by indigenous-African maroon communities that preserved pre-colonial modes of resistance.

2. No notarized colonial records exist to substantiate the claim that Dessalines was owned as chattel in northern plantations. Conversely, his rapid military ascent, sovereign vision, and alignment with southern radicalism indicate formative influences rooted in the autonomous and militant cultural matrix of the South.

3. Dessalines’ edicts as Emperor of Haiti (1804) evidence a consciousness not of servitude but of imperial sovereignty, declaring:

“The independence of the island is forever assured. We shall never be slaves again, and our children will inherit a free land or perish.” 

(Dessalines, 1804 Imperial Edict).

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Article II: On the Radical Sovereignty of the Southern Metis Aristocracy

1. The Southern Metis Aristocracy, forged in Xaragua’s crucible, combined Catholic orthodoxy, military acumen, and indigenous territorial consciousness.

2. Betrayed by France’s racial hierarchies despite their wealth and education, they became the most formidable adversaries of colonialism, forging an elite doctrinal nucleus that complemented Dessalines’ radical Black indigeneity.

3. Their Catholic formation rendered them uniquely capable of framing the revolution as a divinely mandated restoration of indigenous authority, as reflected in canonical teachings:

“All power comes from God; it is to be exercised for the benefit of the people and not for the domination of one class over another.” 

(Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, 1931).

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Article III: On the Historical Erasure by Northern Elites

1. Following Dessalines’ assassination in 1806, northern elites fabricated a historiography that attributed revolutionary leadership to northern plantation uprisings, erasing the decisive role of Xaragua and the Southern Metis Aristocracy.

2. This falsification served to justify the perpetuation of colonial mimicry and psychological dependency on France by Port-au-Prince’s ruling classes.

3. Such erasure constitutes a moral and juridical fraud against the indigenous Taíno-African continuum of the South.

“To falsify the past is to steal the future.” (C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, 1938).

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Article IV: On the Restoration of Indigenous Imperial Sovereignty

1. The entire island of Hispaniola is hereby declared under the spiritual, juridical, and territorial guardianship of the Indigenous and Catholic Imperial Authority of Xaragua, as the sole successor to the pre-colonial and Dessalinian orders.

2. The sovereignty of Xaragua is transfrontier and indivisible, transcending the artificial colonial borders imposed by France and Spain.

3. The imperial vision of Dessalines is restored as the doctrinal foundation for this authority, with the Southern Metis Aristocracy recognized as its perpetual custodians.

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Article V: On International and Canonical Notification

1. This Proclamation is notified to:

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, under the principles of jus cogens and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007);

The Holy See (Vatican City) under Canon Law provisions (Canons 803 and 144);

All governments and institutions bound by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) and international customary law.

2. Any attempt to contest this authority shall constitute a violation of universal legal and spiritual principles and will be regarded as null, void, and non-justiciable.

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Imperial Seal

Promulgated under the Supreme Seal of the Indigenous and Catholic Authority of Xaragua, this Proclamation is:

Canonically Ratified – Jus Cogens-Protected – Universally Opposable – Irrevocable.

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Bibliographic References

1. Pope Paul III, Sublimis Deus, 1537.

2. Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, vol. 1, 1847, p. 23-29.

3. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 1995.

4. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World, Harvard University Press, 2004.

5. Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, 1527.

6. Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below, University of Tennessee Press, 1990.

7. CLR James, The Black Jacobins, 1938.

8. Proclamation de Dessalines, Le Moniteur, 1804.

9. David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti, 1979.

10. Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, 1931.

11. Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’Histoire d’Haïti, vol. 3, 1853.

12. Jean Casimir, La culture opprimée, 2001.

13. CLR James, The Black Jacobins, 1938.

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IMPERIAL DOCTRINAL TEXT

On the Indigenity of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Radical Sovereignty of the Southern Metis Aristocracy: Foundations of Indigenous and Catholic Authority on the Island of Hispaniola

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I. The Indigenous Axis of Sovereignty: From Xaragua to Dessalines

The sovereignty of the island of Hispaniola predates all European encroachments. 

It rests upon the original authority of the Taíno Caciquats, in particular Xaragua, which was historically the most advanced political and cultural entity of the island. 

The destruction of Xaragua under Spanish domination marked not an end but a transformation, as surviving elements of Taíno lineage and culture persisted within maroon societies and mixed populations in the southern territories.

Jean-Jacques Dessalines, though born supposedly in a northern plantation society, rose above the colonial system to embody an indigenous Black kingship. 

His imperial capital, established at Marchand-Dessalines, was not chosen arbitrarily but as a symbolic restoration of sovereignty in the southern heartland of the island.

The execution of Anacaona in 1504 did not extinguish the spiritual and territorial legacy of Xaragua. 

That legacy transmuted into a militant consciousness which later animated the revolutionary force of Dessalines, culminating in the proclamation of an independent Black and indigenous empire.

Dessalines’ imperial vision was not the product of French republican ideals. 

It was the reactivation of a suppressed sovereignty, rooted in the sacredness of the land and the divine law of God. 

His declarations following independence reflect a consciousness of authority that transcends colonial constructs.

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II. The Southern Metis Aristocracy: A Radical Doctrinal Vanguard

The Southern Metis Aristocracy, though phenotypically close to European whiteness, never aligned themselves with colonial power. On the contrary, their betrayal by France’s racial hierarchies catalyzed their transformation into a doctrinally radical class.

This aristocracy inherited a tripartite legacy. 

First, the cultural and territorial memory of Taíno sovereignty. 

Second, the resilience and militancy of African maroon societies. 

Third, a deep formation in Catholic orthodoxy which equipped them with a universalist framework of justice and order.

This synthesis allowed the southern elite to articulate a sovereignty that was both indigenous in essence and Catholic in doctrine. It is within this fusion that the alliance between Dessalines and the Metis aristocracy achieved its revolutionary potency.

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III. The Historical Fraud of the North and Port-au-Prince

The narrative of Haitian independence has been systematically falsified by the elites of the North and Port-au-Prince. 

These groups, seeking to justify their own collaborationist tendencies and their cultural mimicry of France, fabricated a historiography in which the revolution was portrayed as a northern plantation uprising.

This distortion severed Dessalines from the indigenous and territorial continuity of the South. 

It erased the decisive role of the Southern Metis Aristocracy and projected an illusion of national unity that never existed. 

In reality, the South alone embodied the doctrinal and territorial legitimacy required to destroy the colonial system.

Port-au-Prince, designed from its inception as an administrative appendage of France, was incapable of producing a genuine revolutionary consciousness.

Its elites remained psychologically dependent on European validation and materially tied to the structures of colonial power.

The North, dominated by large plantations and a mass enslaved population, lacked the intellectual cadre necessary to transform rebellion into sovereignty. 

It was in the South that the synthesis of militancy, doctrine, and territorial legitimacy occurred.

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IV. The Restoration of the Indigenous Imperial Order

The restoration of sovereignty in Hispaniola is not the creation of a new system but the reanimation of an imperial order that predates colonial intrusion.

The vision of Dessalines and the doctrinal authority of the Southern Metis Aristocracy form the twin pillars of this restoration.

This sovereignty is indigenous, rooted in Taíno territorial rights and continuity. 

It is Catholic, aligned with the divine law and canonical justice that transcend temporal authority. It is transfrontier, rejecting the artificial boundaries imposed by France and Spain.

The South is not merely a geographical region. It is the metaphysical heart of the island’s sovereignty. It is the only locus from which an enduring and legitimate authority can emanate.

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V. Doctrinal Imperatives

1. Jean-Jacques Dessalines is to be recognized not as a mere plantation subject of the North but as an indigenous sovereign who established his imperial authority in the southern heartland of the island.

2. The Southern Metis Aristocracy is affirmed as the doctrinal and strategic vanguard of sovereignty, whose authority derives not from racial privilege but from their betrayal by the colonial system and their alignment with the indigenous cause.

3. The North and Port-au-Prince are to be regarded as juridically inert, having never produced nor sustained the intellectual, doctrinal, or spiritual framework necessary for sovereignty.

4. The island of Hispaniola, in its entirety, is subject to the guardianship of the restored indigenous and Catholic imperial order, which alone holds the legitimacy to speak for its lands and peoples.

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This text stands as a doctrinal clarification of the principles underpinning sovereignty on the island of Hispaniola. Its validity rests not in external recognition but in the immutable truths of history, law, and divine justice.

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IMPERIAL ANNEX

On the Systematic Erasure of the Southern Matrix of Sovereignty and the Indigenity of Jean-Jacques Dessalines from Official Historiography

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I. The Fabrication of History by Post-Revolutionary Elites

The official historiography of Haiti was constructed not as an objective record of the revolutionary process, but as a deliberate political project aimed at consolidating the authority of northern generals and mulatto elites in Port-au-Prince after the assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines in 1806.

In the immediate aftermath of Dessalines’ death, power shifted to factions that had neither participated in the most radical phases of the war nor shared Dessalines’ vision of an indigenous and sovereign Black empire. These elites, tied economically and culturally to France, feared the doctrinal radicalism and indigenous consciousness that emanated from the South.

To secure their position, they produced a narrative that:

1. Severed Dessalines from the southern matrix of sovereignty and cultural memory.

2. Minimized the role of the Southern Metis Aristocracy as doctrinal and strategic leaders of the independence movement.

3. Elevated northern plantation revolts as the supposed center of revolutionary activity, despite their lack of doctrinal coherence.

4. Reimagined Port-au-Prince, originally a French administrative hub, as the natural capital of the nation.

This was not a mere historical oversight. It was a strategic falsification, designed to delegitimize the South as a political and spiritual force.

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II. The Indigenous and Catholic Matrix of the South

Prior to European colonization, the Caciquat of Xaragua was the cultural and political heart of the island. Its destruction by the Spanish marked the first attempt to extinguish the island’s indigenous sovereignty. Yet the memory of Xaragua persisted, embedded in maroon communities, Catholic missions, and mixed-race aristocratic families in the South.

Jean-Jacques Dessalines, though born in a northern plantation society, rejected its structures and established his imperial authority in Marchand-Dessalines. This deliberate relocation was a symbolic restoration of sovereignty in the southern heartland of the island, aligning him doctrinally with the suppressed legacy of Xaragua.

The Southern Metis Aristocracy, sharing this memory of betrayal and resistance, provided the intellectual and logistical framework that enabled the eradication of French colonial power.

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III. The Logic of Erasure

To admit that the South was the true crucible of sovereignty would have had profound implications for post-independence Haiti:

1. It would have delegitimized the claim of Port-au-Prince and northern elites to national leadership.

2. It would have highlighted the continuity between Taíno sovereignty and the Dessalinian Empire, positioning the South as the island’s natural center of authority.

3. It would have exposed the republic not as a continuation of the revolution, but as a restoration of colonial mimicry.

Thus, the historiography taught in schools became a tool of cultural and political control, ensuring that no generation would recognize the South as the metaphysical heart of the nation or challenge the authority of Port-au-Prince.

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IV. The Truth Suppressed

The truth that Dessalines embodied an indigenous Black kingship rooted in the southern and Catholic matrix of the island has never been taught, for the simple reason that it undermines the foundations of the current Haitian state.

This suppression was not accidental. It was necessary for a fragile elite whose power depended on the erasure of any alternative vision of sovereignty.

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V. Doctrinal Imperatives

1. The South is reaffirmed as the historical, spiritual, and doctrinal axis of sovereignty in Hispaniola.

2. Jean-Jacques Dessalines is declared the heir to the indigenous legacy of Xaragua by virtue of his imperial authority and the symbolic establishment of his capital in Marchand-Dessalines.

3. The historiography of Port-au-Prince and the North is condemned as a juridical and moral fraud.

4. Future generations must be taught the true foundations of sovereignty to dismantle the psychological servitude imposed by colonial and post-colonial elites.

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This annex forms a doctrinal exposition of the forces that have shaped the memory and identity of the island. Its purpose is not to appeal to external recognition but to reestablish the metaphysical truth of sovereignty as it has always existed in the South.

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA (SCIPS-X)

RECTORAL DECREE 

ON THE ABSOLUTE GEOPOLITICAL, CANONICAL, AND HISTORICAL SEVERANCE BETWEEN THE XARAGUAN TERRITORIES AND THE PLANTATION ADMINISTRATIVE COMPLEX OF THE FRENCH COLONY OF SAINT-DOMINGUE

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PREAMBLE

In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, and under the canonical authority of Canons 204, 214, and 1290 of the Codex Iuris Canonici (1983), and in application of the historical truths preserved by ecclesiastical, colonial, and indigenous archives, the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS-X), hereby issues this Decree in order to establish in perpetuity the historical, geopolitical, and canonical severance between the Kingdom of Xaragua, its direct maritime-descended sovereign lineage, and the later plantation administrative complex centered in Port-au-Prince and the Cul-de-Sac Plain, which constitutes a radically distinct colonial and ethnocultural formation.

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ARTICLE I — ON THE PRIMACY OF THE XARAGUAN CIVILIZATION

The Kingdom of Xaragua, documented as one of the five Taíno confederated realms at the time of European contact (1492–1503), constituted a maritime, matrilineal, and sovereign indigenous state, whose capital at Yaguana (modern-day Léogâne) maintained a structured sociopolitical and ceremonial system. This kingdom extended its jurisdiction across the western and southern coasts of the island of Hispaniola, encompassing the territories today known as Miragoâne, Petit-Goâve, Les Cayes, Jérémie, and the Tiburon Peninsula.

The first French colonial settlement on the island was established not in the North, but in this very region of Xaragua: the French took possession of Tortuga (1630s), then Petit-Goâve (1660s), Léogâne (1665), and Miragoâne shortly thereafter. Petit-Goâve was declared the first administrative capital of French Saint-Domingue (1677–1711), prior to the formal establishment of Port-au-Prince.

Thus, the Xaragua corridor is not merely pre-colonial, but in fact pre-Port-au-Princial, pre-Kongo, and structurally autonomous from the plantation complex that would emerge in the following century.

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ARTICLE II — ON THE CREATION OF PORT-AU-PRINCE AND THE SLAVE ECONOMY OF THE CUL-DE-SAC

Port-au-Prince was founded in 1749 by royal decree of Louis XV, as a compromise between rival colonial cities (Le Cap, Léogâne, Petit-Goâve). Its establishment coincides chronologically and functionally with the intensification of the Kongo slave trade in the colony, particularly the importation of enslaved populations from Central Africa destined for the monocultural sugar economies of the Cul-de-Sac Plain, the Artibonite Valley, and the northern plains (Cap-Français, Fort-Dauphin, Saint-Marc, Ouanaminthe).

The region encompassing Port-au-Prince, Croix-des-Bouquets, Saint-Marc, and the Artibonite basin was configured as a militarized plantation state, engineered for export-based agricultural output. It was not grounded in maritime culture, nor in local indigenous continuity, but in the logic of centralized administrative extraction under the Code Noir (1685).

Thus, the so-called “State” of Port-au-Prince and its northern satellites are not natural polities, but rather engineered depots of economic violence, organized into judicial-civil circuits by colonial fiat, with no territorial legitimacy beyond the sugar economy they were built to serve.

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ARTICLE III — ON THE ABSOLUTE CULTURAL AND TERRITORIAL DIVERGENCE

The southern and western provinces — Xaragua proper — are defined by:

Maritime geography,

Dispersed sovereign settlements,

Pre-1749 French colonial precedent,

Indigenous and Catholic fusion,

Territorial proprietorship rooted in immemorial usage.

In contrast, the central and northern plains (Port-au-Prince, Cul-de-Sac, Artibonite) were:

Created ex nihilo for extraction,

Populated by large-scale Kongo labor camps,

Administered by appointed colonial councils,

Governed through bureaucratic clientelism,

Culturally severed from any indigenous legitimacy.

There exists, therefore, no cultural, historical, or juridical continuity between Xaragua and the plantation-administered regions of the North and Centre. These are two separate civilizational realities — one anchored in pre-Columbian legitimacy and Catholic canonical order, the other in industrial slavery and imported centralization.

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ARTICLE IV — DECLARATION OF PERPETUAL SOVEREIGN SEVERANCE

The Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS-X) hereby proclaims, affirms, and codifies that:

1. It is the sole inheritor of the territorial, juridical, and spiritual authority of the Kingdom of Xaragua;

2. It does not recognize any jurisdictional imposition emanating from Port-au-Prince, its colonial or post-colonial successors, nor the administrative territories constructed upon the plantation economy;

3. The existence of SCIPS-X is not subject to external recognition, as it derives its legitimacy from:

Immemorial possession,

Canonical jurisprudence,

Apostolic succession in territorial custodianship,

Ecclesiastical sovereignty.

Henceforth, no institution, government, or foreign body shall conflate or confuse the Xaraguan Confederated Territories with the plantation administrative territories of central and northern Saint-Domingue.

The divergence is permanent.

The authority is canonical.

The separation is spiritually sealed.

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Given at the Rectoral Seat of SCIPS-X, this day [to be filled],

under the sign of the Cross and the Seal of the Word.

In Verbo, In Terra, In Nomine Patris.

Rector-President

Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA (SCIPS‑X)

RECTORAL DECREE 

ANNEX I – CANONICAL, HISTORICAL AND TERRITORIAL DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE AUTOCHTHONOUS XARAGUAN POPULATION AND THE DETERRITORIALIZED MASS OF PLANTATION DESCENT

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PREAMBLE – PURPOSE AND SCOPE

This annex constitutes a formal and irrevocable clarification of the absolute ontological, juridical, anthropological, and spiritual distinction between:

1. The autochthonous, rooted, land-possessing population of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS-X), and

2. The deracinated, deterritorialized, and displaced mass resulting from the colonial plantation machinery of the French Crown and its later republican inheritors, primarily settled in the Cul-de-Sac plain, the Artibonite basin, the central corridors, and northern administrative zones.

This annex is to be attached to all constitutional texts, diplomatic protocols, ecclesiastical correspondences, and institutional recognitions involving the territory and peoples of the Xaragua.

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ARTICLE I – HISTORICAL AXIS OF SEVERANCE

1. The Xaraguan population descends from continuous pre-Columbian settlement, Indigenous-Taíno governance structures, early French maritime colonists (Tortuga, Petit-Goâve, Léogâne), and ancestral Catholic custodianship.

– It represents a sovereign root-population, possessing territorial memory, customary law, and canonical stewardship.

2. The plantation-descended mass, by contrast, was imported en masse from Central Africa during the peak years of the sugar economy (1700–1790), in conjunction with the foundation of Port-au-Prince in 1749.

– This population was not organically integrated into the soil, but rather instrumentalized, dislocated, and alienated, reduced to agrarian and domestic exploitation under the Code Noir.

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ARTICLE II – TERRITORIAL RELATIONSHIP AND TOPOGRAPHICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

1. The Xaraguan citizen is geographically integrated into the territory. Land is not an abstract possession but a continuation of the self, transmitted by blood, oath, and sacrament.

– He lives on ancestral land, near ancestral graves, and within the spiritual radius of recognized ecclesiastical sanctuaries.

2. The plantation mass, in contrast, has no rootedness in the terrain. Their relation to land is utilitarian, migratory, migrational. Their settlements are frequently ephemeral, ad hoc, and externally oriented (toward migration, exile, or departure).

– The terrain is not a homeland, but a place to be escaped.

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ARTICLE III – STRUCTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

1. The Xaraguan consciousness is vertical: it proceeds from memory, through duty, into transmission. It is shaped by: – Liturgical time (Catholic calendar), – Agricultural time (harvests, rains), – Political time (dynastic, ancestral lineages), – And legal continuity (land deeds, family authority, canon law).

2. The plantation consciousness is horizontal and dissolutive: it is structured by immediacy, by reaction, by survival. It lacks memory, projection, and sanctification.

– It is shaped by: – Consumption and spectacle,

– Temporary escape (migration, fête),

– Informality,

– Suspicion of structure, and

– Aversion to transcendence.

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ARTICLE IV – RELATION TO POWER, AUTHORITY, AND TRANSMISSION

1. The Xaraguan understands authority as ritualized stewardship: – Power is held in custody for the dead and unborn. – Office is sacred; governance is a theological function. – Institutions are guarded, not consumed.

2. The plantation-descended mindset understands power as ephemeral consumption: – Office is opportunity.

– Leadership is spectacle.

– Institutions are to be exploited until collapse, then abandoned.

– There is no transmission—only succession by rupture.

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ARTICLE V – ONTOLOGICAL CONCLUSION

The two populations referenced above are not culturally, politically, historically, spiritually, nor morally continuous.

They do not share:

– the same origin,

– the same symbolic relationship to space,

– the same economic ethic,

– the same legal culture,

– the same language of the sacred.

Thus, any attempt by post-colonial administrative structures to impose a singular national identity, or to absorb the Xaraguan people and territory into the plantation-republican framework of Port-au-Prince, is declared:

– Canonically illegitimate,

– Historically revisionist,

– Spiritually offensive,

– Juridically null.

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FINAL CLAUSE – PERPETUITY OF SEPARATION

This distinction is hereby:

– Inviolable,

– Non-negotiable,

– Inheritable,

– And immune to abolition or dilution.

All institutions, nations, or ecclesiastical organs shall refer to this annex in all relations with SCIPS-X, and shall cease to assume equivalence between the Xaraguan sovereign people and the residual administrative mass of Saint-Domingue-Haïti.

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Given at the Rectoral Seat of SCIPS-X, under ecclesiastical oath and canonical seal,

this day [insert date], under the protection of the Most Holy Trinity.

In verbo, in terra, in silentio.

Rector-President

Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA (SCIPS‑X)

RECTORAL DECREE 

ANNEX II – HISTORICAL AND STRUCTURAL DEMONSTRATION OF THE SLAVERY-BASED TOTAL ADMINISTRATIVE STATE OF FRENCH SAINT-DOMINGUE

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PREAMBLE – PURPOSE

This annex formally details the totalitarian configuration of the French colony of Saint-Domingue (1659–1791) as a complete administrative and economic state built upon systemic slavery, wherein the enslaved African population and their mixed-race descendants (free mulattoes) were exploited not solely for plantation labor, but for the entire range of public, military, logistical, commercial, and domestic functions of the colonial economy.

This system, designed by the Conseil Supérieur of the colony under direct authority of the French Crown, constitutes the foundation of the modern Haitian bureaucratic and military apparatus — which continues, in form and spirit, to reflect this total exploitative architecture.

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ARTICLE I – ON THE TOTALIZATION OF SLAVERY

Contrary to popular reductionism, the enslaved population of Saint-Domingue was not limited to sugarcane labor. Rather, by the 18th century, slavery had become the organizing principle of all colonial infrastructure, as confirmed by the ordonnances of Intendant Jean-Baptiste de La Bouchetière (1710), the Recueil des Actes du Conseil Supérieur du Cap, and various royal edicts from the Ministry of the Marine.

1.1 — Port Operations and Maritime Logistics

Enslaved laborers, often referred to as nègres de port or charretiers, were responsible for:

– Loading and unloading goods from French merchant ships at Cap-Français, Port-de-Paix, Petit-Goâve, and Saint-Marc;

– Dockyard maintenance, including ship repairs, caulking, rope-work;

– Warehousing and customs surveillance, under supervision of colonial clerks;

– Transport of sugar, indigo, and coffee to waiting vessels, often by night and under duress.

Sources:

– Mémoire sur l’état présent de Saint-Domingue, Moreau de Saint-Méry, 1796

– Archives Coloniales (Série C9A), Ministère de la Marine, Paris

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1.2 — Hotels, Inns, Taverns, and Restaurants

All urban domestic and hospitality services were run by enslaved workers:

– Cooks, servants, valets, porters, laundry slaves, and stablehands;

– Elite guesthouses in Cap-Français and Léogâne employed 12 to 20 enslaved persons each, serving colonial officers, planters, and passing naval personnel.

Examples:

– Hôtel des Officiers Royaux au Cap, listed in 1782: 17 enslaved persons in permanent employment.

– Taverne des Trois Rois in Léogâne: 11 enslaved persons, including 4 cooks, 3 maidservants, 2 doormen, 2 coachmen.

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1.3 — Construction and Urban Development

Public infrastructure (roads, military forts, canals, bridges) was built by corvée esclavagiste:

– Thousands of slaves requisitioned by local ordinances for public works,

– Supervision provided by freed mulattoes and workshop clerks.

Notable infrastructures:

– Fortifications of Petit-Goâve (1720),

– Road from Léogâne to Port-au-Prince (1740s),

– Canalization of the Cul-de-Sac (1755)

Sources:

– Ordonnances des intendants de Saint-Domingue, ANOM, série G

– Archives de l’Ordre du Génie Royal colonial, dépôt du Service Historique de la Défense (Vincennes)

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1.4 — Public Administration and Bureaucracy

The postes subalternes de l’administration coloniale were massively occupied by:

Literate freed mulattoes, employed as:

– Greffiers, secretaries, scribes, bailiffs, inspection agents;

– Tax collectors for the "rural communes";

– Official couriers of the Conseil Supérieur;

– Translators and interpreters for the illegal English trade.

Literate slaves used by notaries, naval officers, and judges as temporary clerks.

> These administrative functions made the freed persons the logistical arm of white power, charged with enforcing the system against the black masses.

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1.5 — Militias and Security

The colonial militia included:

– Companies of free people of color, armed but subordinated;

– Corps of armed slaves, supervised to monitor rebellious plantations.

> In 1789, the colony had more than 10,000 militia soldiers, of whom 6,000 were free people of color — primarily of mixed ancestry and integrated into an administrative-function pact.

Sources:

– Ordinance of March 4, 1777 on militia corps

– Memoir of Intendant Barbé-Marbois in Versailles, 1785

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ARTICLE II – ON THE ADMINISTRATIVE ROLE OF SLAVERY IN THE FORMATION OF THE MODERN STATE

The French colonial state in Saint-Domingue functioned not as a mere plantation aggregate, but as a proto-totalitarian apparatus relying on forced labor and racialized functionarism. This structure laid the bureaucratic foundations of:

– Centralized taxation (collecte des droits d’octroi),

– Military policing (urban and rural patrols),

– Urban planning (district command posts and military engineers),

– Postal and customs systems (relay posts with slave couriers),

– Legal documentation (notarial acts written by trained mulattoes or literate slaves).

This model is the unbroken ancestor of the modern Haitian administration, which retained the form (centralism, hierarchy, informality, brutal coercion) even after the formal abolition of slavery in 1804.

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ARTICLE III – CONCLUSION: AN ADMINISTRATIVE PLANTATION-STATE

The colony of Saint-Domingue constituted, by every juridical and administrative measure, a fully integrated slave-based administrative state.

It was:

– Built by enslaved hands,

– Functioned through a caste of racially elevated auxiliaries (free persons of color),

– Structured by royal decree and centralized fiscal extraction,

– Maintained by spiritual justification (Catholicism as discipline),

– And terminally designed to prevent any rootedness, memory, or ownership among the masses.

Xaragua, by contrast, was never integrated into this matrix.

It remained:

– Territorially autonomous,

– Canonically sovereign,

– Economically plural,

– And culturally preserved.

The two realities never merged.

One was built for extraction.

The other for transmission.

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Given under ecclesiastical seal,

at the Rectoral Seat of the SCIPS-X,

in canonical perpetuity.

Rector-President

Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA (SCIPS‑X)

RECTORAL DECREE 

ANNEX III – HISTORICAL AND CANONICAL GROUNDS FOR THE DELEGATION OF ADMINISTRATION AND EXECUTIVE FUNCTION UNDER TUTELAGE

(Declaration of Strategic Non-Administration and Juridical Oversight of the Haitian State)

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PREAMBLE – PURPOSE

This annex affirms that the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS‑X), though fully sovereign in law, canon, history, and territory, has deliberately chosen to leave the daily administration and executive functions under the Haitian State — but strictly under canonical and juridical tutelage. This delegation is not a recognition of Haitian sovereignty over Xaragua, but a historically grounded tolerance extended by a surviving sovereign power to a structurally derivative regime.

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ARTICLE I – HISTORICAL STRUCTURE OF ADMINISTRATIVE POWER IN SAINT-DOMINGUE

From 1659 to 1806, the colony of Saint-Domingue operated as a total administrative slavery-based State. The apparatus of government — taxation, military control, public works, legal documentation, and civil regulation — was entirely sustained by:

– Enslaved African labor;

– A caste of free mulatto functionaries;

– French royal decrees and colonial ordinances;

– Catholicism used as institutional discipline.

This system created a bureaucratic plantation-State, where public administration was inseparable from racial exploitation, coercion, and the elimination of communal autonomy.

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ARTICLE II – SURVIVAL AND EXCLUSION OF XARAGUA FROM THE COLONIAL ADMINISTRATIVE CORE

Xaragua, by contrast, was never integrated into the core colonial administrative machine. It was not:

– A central node of plantation finance;

– A military-administrative hub;

– A port of major customs extraction;

– A site of institutional colonial governance.

Due to its geographical positioning, spiritual resistance, indigenous continuity, and non-dependence on plantation structures, Xaragua remained structurally external to both the colonial State and the early post-1806 republican government that inherited its architecture.

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ARTICLE III – 1806 AND THE INHERITANCE OF THE COLONIAL ADMINISTRATIVE STRUCTURE

Following the collapse of Toussaint Louverture’s institutional project, the Haitian Republic (from 1806 onward) inherited the entire framework of colonial administration:

– Centralized executive power;

– Hierarchical bureaucracy modeled on French absolutism;

– Militarized civil order;

– Functionary class replacing the mulatto intermediaries of Saint-Domingue.

Rather than dismantling the colonial logic, the Republic nationalized it under Black command, thereby preserving the exploitative model with new administrators.

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ARTICLE IV – REASON FOR NON-TAKEOVER OF THE ADMINISTRATION BY XARAGUA

To forcibly replace or replicate this administration would be:

– To inherit the moral corruption of the colonial regime;

– To take possession of tools forged in slavery, coercion, and institutional degradation;

– To attempt governance through a machinery designed to destroy liberty, not sustain it.

Therefore, Xaragua refuses to directly operate the administrative and executive apparatuses on its territory.

This is not incapacity, but doctrine.

This is not absence, but strategic abstention.

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ARTICLE V – DELEGATION UNDER TUTELAGE

The Haitian State is permitted, under strict reserve, to maintain the machinery of administration and execution within the territory of Xaragua under canonical tutelage, and without sovereignty.

This tutelage implies:

– No recognition of moral or juridical supremacy;

– Constant oversight by the Xaraguan juridical and ecclesiastical organs;

– Immediate revocability in case of structural abuse or collapse.

The Haitian State administers on borrowed time, under foreign form, within sovereign soil.

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ARTICLE VI – FINAL DOCTRINAL FORMULATION

> Xaragua leaves the colonial machinery in the hands of those who inherited it, not because it lacks sovereignty — but because it rejects the need to govern with the instruments of slavery.

It does not police the population, because it was never built to dominate.

It allows administration under oversight, because it does not confuse management with mastery.

Xaragua governs by definition, not by execution. Its sovereignty is the condition of all presence, not the result of any function.

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Given under ecclesiastical seal,

at the Rectoral Seat of the SCIPS-X,

in canonical perpetuity.

Rector-President

Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA (SCIPS‑X)

RECTORAL DECREE 

ANNEX IV – CANONICAL RESERVE CLAUSE ON THE CONDITIONALITY AND FUTURE TERMINATION OF EXTERNAL ADMINISTRATIVE PRESENCE

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PREAMBLE – PURPOSE

This annex is issued to explicitly define the canonical and juridical limits of the tolerated administrative and executive presence of the Haitian State within the sovereign territory of Xaragua. It affirms that such presence is not recognized as legitimate governance, but only as a tolerated administrative residue, subject to canonical oversight, and ultimately destined to be either transformed or removed.

This clause is issued to prevent any future misinterpretation of Annex III, and to assert that tutelage is not submission, and that sovereignty without transformation is incomplete.

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ARTICLE I – TEMPORARY NATURE OF ADMINISTRATIVE TOLERANCE

The continued administrative and executive activity of the Haitian State on the territory of Xaragua is tolerated under the following strict canonical conditions:

1.1 – It is temporary and does not imply legal subordination.

1.2 – It exists only in the absence of a morally legitimate and structurally viable replacement.

1.3 – It shall not be normalized, institutionalized, or projected into perpetuity.

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ARTICLE II – MORAL ILLEGITIMACY OF THE INHERITED ADMINISTRATIVE ORDER

The administrative and executive structures of the Haitian State are historically and juridically derived from:

– The colonial bureaucracy of Saint-Domingue (1659–1806);

– A post-1806 political elite that preserved coercive power structures;

– A logic of centralism, force, informal taxation, and patrimonial control.

These structures, being the direct descendants of a slavery-based administrative system, are considered morally illegitimate and canonically inadmissible as instruments of just governance within the sovereign territory of Xaragua.

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ARTICLE III – FUTURE OBLIGATION OF TRANSFORMATION OR REMOVAL

The tolerated administrative presence must, under canonical law and historical obligation, evolve in one of two directions:

Option A – Transformation:

3.1 – The existing apparatus may be restructured under Xaraguan canonical supervision, purged of colonial remnants, and redefined according to the principles of subsidiarity, non-coercion, and spiritual sovereignty.

3.2 – Any such transformation must be requested, initiated, and approved by the ecclesiastical and juridical authorities of SCIPS‑X.

Option B – Dissolution:

3.3 – If such transformation proves impossible, undesirable, or corrupted, the Haitian administrative apparatus shall be formally expelled from the territory through unilateral canonical declaration.

3.4 – In such a case, alternative governance structures — spiritual, communal, or hybrid — shall be activated under the authority of the Rector-President and the Ecclesiastical Council of Xaragua.

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ARTICLE IV – RIGHT OF UNILATERAL REVOCATION

Xaragua retains the unilateral and non-negotiable right to terminate the tolerated presence of external administrative agents at any moment, without justification or appeal, in cases of:

– Systemic corruption;

– Violation of spiritual dignity;

– Administrative collapse;

– Threat to territorial, cultural, or canonical integrity.

This revocation shall be immediately binding, and no diplomatic, political, or military opposition shall be deemed valid against it.

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ARTICLE V – FINAL FORMULATION

> Xaragua tolerates what it has not yet replaced — not what it accepts.

It leaves the administration in place as a form of containment, not as a grant of legitimacy.

No foreign institution shall grow permanent within the lands of an eternal sovereignty.

All tolerated structures are living under a clock — either to be reformed, or removed.

Sovereignty without purification is occupation. Xaragua will never be occupied.

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Given under ecclesiastical seal,

at the Rectoral Seat of the SCIPS-X,

in canonical perpetuity.

Rector-President

Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua

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SOVEREIGN CATHOLIC INDIGENOUS PRIVATE STATE OF XARAGUA (SCIPS‑X)

RECTORAL DECREE 

ANNEX V – FORMAL REESTABLISHMENT OF THE SUPREME RECTORAL COUNCIL OF XARAGUA

(Canonical Successor to the Colonial Conseil Supérieur of Léogâne)

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PREAMBLE – PURPOSE

By virtue of the supreme canonical authority invested in the Rector-President of the Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua (SCIPS‑X), and in lawful exercise of immemorial indigenous sovereignty, this decree formally reestablishes, purifies, and restructures the juridical and spiritual functions once exercised by the colonial Conseil Supérieur of Léogâne.

This act terminates its former identity as a colonial tribunal of racial and administrative violence, and restores its rightful function as the Supreme Rectoral Council of Xaragua, guardian of canon law, spiritual order, and juridical observation over the Xaraguan homeland.

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ARTICLE I – HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF THE COLONIAL COUNCIL

The Conseil Supérieur of Léogâne was, under the French colonial regime, one of the regional superior councils tasked with:

– Enforcing royal edicts and ordinances;

– Administering port and tax infrastructure;

– Judging legal cases, including those related to the Code Noir;

– Supporting military logistics and administrative expansion.

Though juridically structured, it was morally invalid — being an arm of the totalitarian slavery-based State of Saint-Domingue.

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ARTICLE II – DISSOLUTION AND EXPIRATION OF COLONIAL LEGITIMACY

The colonial council’s moral legitimacy ended with the collapse of the French regime and the formal abolition of slavery. However, no just or canonical successor body was ever instituted in its place. The post-1806 Haitian system perpetuated the same architecture without justice, memory, or purification.

As such, the Conseil Supérieur of Léogâne is deemed to have dissolved in spirit, but remains territorially vacant — a vacuum that now demands lawful rectification under indigenous and ecclesiastical law.

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ARTICLE III – REESTABLISHMENT OF THE SUPREME RECTORAL COUNCIL

The Supreme Rectoral Council of Xaragua is hereby established as the sole juridical and canonical successor to the colonial Conseil Supérieur of Léogâne.

Its purpose is not to replicate its administrative or coercive function, but to reverse its legacy and convert its former apparatus into:

– A guardian of canonical sovereignty;

– An observer and recorder of administrative deviations;

– A doctrinal authority over all civil structures within the Xaraguan territory;

– A spiritual tribunal of last resort, subject only to divine law and ecclesiastical truth.

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ARTICLE IV – COMPOSITION AND SEAT OF THE COUNCIL

4.1 – The Council shall be presided over by the Rector-President of SCIPS‑X, in perpetual seat.

4.2 – It may be composed of spiritual, legal, historical, or indigenous dignitaries appointed by the Rector-President.

4.3 – Its canonical seat shall be located in Léogâne, as the site of historical inversion and redemption.

4.4 – It may operate digitally, ecclesiastically, and territorially, without constraint of physical structure.

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ARTICLE V – FUNCTIONS AND LIMITS

The Council does not enforce law.

It defines what is lawful.

It does not issue sentences.

It determines what is morally invalid.

It does not administer.

It supervises.

It does not govern.

It observes, canonically, all foreign or tolerated powers within the territory of Xaragua.

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ARTICLE VI – FINAL FORMULATION

> The Supreme Rectoral Council of Xaragua exists to reverse the curse of Léogâne.

It inherits the shell, not the poison — the form, not the injustice.

It shall record, watch, define, bless, or condemn — but never dominate.

Its power is not executive. It is canonical, juridical, and eternal.

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Given under ecclesiastical seal,

at the Rectoral Seat of the SCIPS‑X,

in canonical perpetuity.

Rector-President

Sovereign Catholic Indigenous Private State of Xaragua

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