Displacing Dessalines, or the Transatlantic Geographies of Lamartine’s<i>Toussaint Louverture</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alphonse de Lamartine’s verse drama Toussaint Louverture (1850) stands out as one of the most earnest attempts by a nineteenth-century European writer to grapple with what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has called the ‘unthinkable history’ of the Haitian Revolution. Originally composed to promote abolition of slavery in France’s colonies, the play was not staged until two years after emancipation and after Lamartine’s precipitous fall from political grace. In this context, Toussaint Louverture seemed to offer a defence of Lamartine’s own political legacy. The work has thus been interpreted as an attempt by the author to identify himself with his protagonist, a messianic leader of the Haitian people. This essay examines the transatlantic geography that structures this ‘poème dramatique’. In projecting an ideal nation, France and Haiti are set up in chiastic opposition, and this transatlantic chiasmus only becomes possible through a series of anatopisms, or erreurs de lieu. The central argument holds that this dramatic construction, centred on Toussaint, works to erase or rather displace another key Haitian leader, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the ultimate author of his country’s independence and a radical figure far less amenable to French Republican ideology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".