RIP Bloncourt

Image Courtesy: Île en Île.

Gérald Bloncourt, one of the youth leaders who played a pivotal role in the 1946 revolution in Haiti, passed away last month. Bloncourt altered the course of Haitian political history, alongside Rene Depestre, Jacques Alexis, and many other left-wing students and youth eager for a change in Haiti after World War II. Through a youth journal, La Ruche, and their activism, demonstrations and protests eventually led to autocratic Lescot's fall from the presidency. However, much has been written about January 1946 and the role of Bloncourt at that convergence of radicalism, democratic fervor, the birth of an official Haitian labor movement and political upheaval. Bloncourt deserves additional attention for contributing to the Haitian arts movement as well as photographing the lives and struggles of immigrant communities in France during his long exile from Haiti. 

As someone interested in radicalism, labor, and social movements in Haiti, Bloncourt and his collaborators at La Ruche are a treasure trove of information, context, and details on how Haitian youths coming of age during and after the US Occupation came to Marxism and social movements. Issues of La Ruche are available online at the University of Florida Digital Collections, and the short-lived journal contained a variety of viewpoints on the questions of labor, class, and socialism in a Haitian context. Chenet, Alexis, Menard, Depestre, plus Bloncourt and many others contributed essays on surrealism, the question of inter-class alliances, US imperialism, the color question (showing the influence of Roumain and Christian Beaulieu, particularly the latter's essay in Le Nouvelliste on the Leyburn thesis), Marxism's applicability in an underdeveloped country like Haiti, and the relationship between religion and fascism. 

Bloncourt was clearly a product of this milieu of early radical thought in Haiti, both echoing and predating other Marxist currents in 20th century Haitian politics like Roumain's 1930s party or the subsequent parties, the renewed PCH and the Parti Socialiste Populaire, or PSP. In fact, Bloncourt was surprisingly tied to the second PCH associated with Felix Dorleans Juste, and not the PSP, which suggests the extent to which youth radicals in Haiti at the time were politically divided and differed in their interpretation of Marxism, political activity, and labor movements. Now, with only Depestre and Chenet, the remaining survivors of the Cinq Glorieuses, it behooves us to study in detail the revolutionary moments in Haiti when socialist and democratic change was possible. Bloncourt's generation helped ensure the the middle-class and segments of the working-class had a voice in Haiti. It's up to us to complete the vision.