Qui était Christian Beaulieu?

Beaulieu from Antonin's Jacques Roumain, la passion d'un pays

Who was Christian Beaulieu? Although an important figure in the history of radicalism in Haiti, as well as education and Creole literacy, finding information about Beaulieu is far more difficult than it should be. A friend collaborator of Jacques Roumain, co-founder of the first Haitian Communist Party, and contributor to journals and newspapers such as Les Griots and Le Nouvelliste, as well as a pedagogical review, his paper trail appears far less copious than that of the more famous figures in the annals of the Haitian Left. Understanding who and what Beaulieu represented in the history of education in Haiti, in addition to the development of the Left, provides key insights into the role of language, discourse, and social structure which framed debates among various sects of the Haitian left and labor movement for the next several decades. 

As to the specific details of his life, Leslie Péan appears to be the main source relied on by others. From an article he authored in Le Petit Samedi Soir, Michel Hector and Matthew J. Smith draw their data. Beaulieu was, according to Hector, a "travailleur immigré" in the Dominican Republic before ending up at Columbia University, studying teaching. Unfortunately, without access to the source material used by Hector, one cannot but remain somewhat confused or mesmerized by the fact of a Haitian migrant worker in the Dominican Republic, presumably in the 1920s, eventually ending up in an elite US university. If Beaulieu was a migrant worker in the DR, presumably his roots were in the Haitian working-class or peasantry, yet his education suggests otherwise. Furthermore, without access to Beaulieu's writings on education, it is difficult to even begin to guess what his education at Columbia's Teacher College entailed, although presumably it shaped his desire to reform Haitian education with Creole instruction, thereby increasing the literacy rate and, in his view, pave the way for Haitians to learn to read French through an etymological orthography. 

By 1932, we learn that Bealieu traveled to New York with Jacques Roumain, seeking aid from the Communist Party to form the first Haitian party. The two must have crossed paths based on opposition to the US Occupation among Haitian youth and organized circles. By the early 1930s, Beaulieu, Roumain, and Louis Diaquoi (who, it must be said, flirted with Marxism) were discussing Marxism, radicalism, etc, and on the cusp of forming the Haitian Communist Party. After experiencing repression from Vincent and expulsion from the city of Port-au-Prince, Beaulieu appears again in the late 1930s, part of a United Front of opposition parties to stop Vincent from seeking another term in 1940. 

By the time of his death in 1943, due to a wartime shortage of penicillin (according to Max D. Sam), Beaulieu's work had appeared in La Nation, Le Nouvelliste and Les Griots, presumably still a Marxist but clearly someone of some degree of status or standing among intellectual circles. Unlike Roumain, who spent his final years with the Bureau d'Ethnologie and serving the Lescot government, Beaulieu appears to not have gone down the path of ethnology or the cultural politics of indigénisme, but was clearly familiar with the aforementioned Diaquoi and others affiliated with Griots. Beaulieu, like Roumain, demonstrate the degree of overlapping affiliations and intellectual journals that combined aspects of radical left-wing politics with noirist intellectuals and nationalists during and after the Occupation.

In terms of developing an orthography for Haitian Creole to promote education, Beaulieu was one of the first. According to Péan, Beaulieu and Faublas jeune were inspired by their socialist politics to develop a standardized orthography for the language. This is a fascinating idea, on the importance of literacy, education in the vernacular, and radical politics, which may explain why the Parti Socialiste Populaire's paper included a Creole section. It speaks to the socialist view of Haiti under US Occupation and after, a period of urbanization, proletarianization, and the need to bring to the masses new ideas and inclusion. Surely, Roumain and Beaulieu confronted the problem of literacy whilst attempting to form cells of their party in working-class quarters of Port-au-Prince, which necessitated an attempt to democratize language in Haiti. 

However, Beaulieu's "Pour Ecrire le Créole" advocates an etymological spelling for the language, which, though more difficult to learn, would facilitate later mastering of French. Phonetic spelling, which ultimately won out in the long run for a standardized Creole, would make it harder for monolingual speakers to learn to read French, which Beaulieu clearly saw as relevant part of Haiti. Access to French literacy would form a breach that opened a wider world to Haitians, which may suggest to some that Beaulieu was a Francophile. Although, in consideration of the fact that the vast majority of words in the tongue are of French origin, perhaps Beaulieu's middle position of mostly using etymological orthography with some concessions to phonetic spelling was an equitable system that would resist the phonetic spellings developed by Protestant missionaries and US linguists. Moreover, as explained by some Creole speakers themselves, the phonetic spelling privileges the Creole of Port-au-Prince and the dominant regions of Haiti, thus still an imperfect system for writing the vernacular language of the nation. 

Beaulieu's "Caste et Classe" in Le Nouvelliste

Ultimately, a phonetic spelling did succeed, but Beaulieu's socialist politics and attempt to call for education in the vernacular sheds light on the role of language among the Haitian Left. Jacques Roumain, for example, wrote Gouverneurs de la Rosée with a fluid language reflecting Creole and French, directly addressing the complex interplay of Haitian society through both languages. Totongi, who has criticized Francophilia in Haiti, has went as far as to suggest that the next literary move for Roumain would have been to embrace the vernacular in toto, which may be a stretch. Nonetheless, it exemplifies the extent to which the Left in Haiti was shaped by the popular vernacular, a need to find a uniquely Haitian voice, and create a proletarian literature. It is difficult to imagine any of this without the impact of Beaulieu on Roumain and other contemporaries. How could a Left make its literary and political aspirations relevant to the working-classes and peasantry without embracing Creole?

Beaulieu's other significant role in the history of the Haitian Left is surely his views on the Leyburn thesis and social relations in the "Black Republic," which can be traced back as far as the founding of the first Communist party. Although Analyse schématique, the first Marxist analysis of the country (excepting references to Marxism by Louis-Joseph Janvier), is usually credited to Roumain, the Haitian Communist Party's publication was a group effort to some extent. Articulating the party's views on the class struggle, the heterogeneous nature of the Haitian proletariat, the suffocating role of imperialism, and the confused manifesto of Réaction Démocratique, it likely represents the confluence of Roumain, Beaulieu, and Étienne Charlier's views. 

Beaulieu, who was a migrant worker in the Dominican Republic, surely knew first hand the proletarianization of the Haitian peasantry, providing much-needed lived experience and contact with the worsening conditions for the proletariat and petite bourgeoisie. Thus, Beaulieu's lived experience was directly tied to the party's formulations of class, color, and imperialism. In short, they argued that color is a mask used by bourgeois politicians to mask class struggle, but the process of proletarianization supposedly connected the class struggle with anti-imperialism. The Party's views on the color question are, therefore, what one would expect from a Communist party of the era, albeit cognizant of the ways in which color did indeed have psychological significance for social relations. Color was, in other words, nothing, but class was everything.

By 1942, Beaulieu further developed a unique perspective on Haitian society in a response to the Leyburn thesis, entitled Caste et Classe. Leyburn, author of what is one of the classic studies of the nation written by an American social scientist, argued Haiti was a caste society in which color was particularly salient. The elite caste were (mostly) mulatto, urban, Catholic, and French-speaking. The masses were rural, spoke Creole, practiced Vodou, etc. Unlike Price-Mars, who also responded to Leyburn's thesis to deny a caste interpretation of Haiti, Beaulieu forged a middle path that, with nuance, captured the degree to which caste and class are interrelated forms of social stratification. Furthermore, certainly the US had features of a caste and class society, particularly with regards to the question of race (the differing interpretations of Oliver C. Cox would be interesting to study in light of Haiti), so Beaulieu's argument for a caste society in transition to class provokes larger questions on the nature of stratification across the Americas. 

Roumain's tribute to Beaulieu, from Oeuvres Complètes

If the color question in Haiti did indeed resemble, to a certain extent, a closed caste-like system, it was in a state of transition as a result of democratization, the development of capitalism (accelerated by the US Occupation), and Haitian social mobility. An incipient class society was in formation, with social mobility disproving any kind of strict caste interpretation based on skin color. According to Beaulieu, this tension between caste and class were the motors of Haitian history, partly shaped by ruling elites at the time who may emphasize one or the other. Thus, the dialectic of class and caste were the engine of change in Haitian society, varying based on the political, economic, and social aims of the dominant party at the time. 

For example, Beaulieu saw the fall of the Liberals in the late 19th century until 1915 as a period emphasizing class, suggesting that the Liberals were, to at least a certain extent, tied to a caste rule, presumably a reference to the stereotype of the political party as one of upper-class mulattoes. US Occupation, from 1915 through 1934, brought back, in spite of the new economic and social forces, a return of caste's predominance through the installation of mostly mulatto presidents, such as Dartiguenave and Borno. Of course, there are a number of problematic assumptions or issues with Beaulieu's approach to the social history of Haiti based on class and caste, but it offers some advantages for thinking about the notorious "color question" in a different manner.

Beaulieu's interpretation also brings to mind the argument of Haitian leftists of later decades, obsessed with proving the Haitian economy to be feudal or semi-feudal. However, a caste society would be one that overlaps with a feudal or semi-feudal economic order, with the class society's full development limited by weak democratization and feudal-like economic conditions. The Parti Socialiste Populaire and subsequent Left organizations would take up similar arguments, which, while possibly clarifying, may introduce other problems inherent in any deterministic Marxism. Beaulieu, however, appears more nuanced in his response to Leyburn than the co-written Analyse schématique of the 1930s.

Beaulieu's view of a caste system en route to class suggests a more contextualized view that captures the perseverance of the old into new forms of social relations, with this tension being more believable than Herskovits's socialized ambivalence or Price-Mars bovarysme. The culturalist framework, which while certainly convincing to a certain degree, could be oriented towards any political agenda, thereby continuing an unequal class system while supposedly uniting all social classes in Haiti through nationalism. Furthermore, he removes any potential trouble of fixating on economic systems, since the caste-like aspects of the US social hierararchy persist in the center of international capitalism. This does suggest, to a certain extent, the independence of the race (color) question within class societies, which cannot be reduced entirely to class. Nevertheless, the color (race) question is still in some shape determined by the class question, since the Beaulieu of the 1940s likely still believed the PCH's argument that color prejudice in Haiti won't cease until the disappearance of the exploitation of the masses by the (mostly mulatto) oppressive bourgeoisie. 

Christian Beaulieu's College of Petion-Ville also involved Etienne Charlier and Max D. Sam, familiar names with the Haitian Left. 

In retrospect, Beaulieu's lived experience, practical Marxism, and educational reforms suggest his importance for the development of the Left may be underappreciated. Additional research must be done to understand precisely the scope of his Creole literacy project, but his influence on Roumain and the subsequent generations cannot be refuted. His views on education and the nature of Haitian social stratification were shaped by his Marxism, but not limited by it. By 1941, he saw to some extent the issue of the "color question" (or, race) as independent of class, but the combination of the two (with their internal contradictions) as the motor in the nation's history. One cannot but think of the famous stipulation on the nature of racial and class oppression in The Black Jacobins when considering Beaulieu's nuanced perspective. Undoubtedly, Beaulieu's lived experience in New York and the Dominican Republic suggest the larger regional implications of his ideas. There is something particularly ironic about US or European observers describing Haiti as a caste society in consideration of extreme racial inequality in the US at the time.

Edit (7-17-2019)

Leslie Péan's 1979 article on Christian Beaulieu fills in several gaps in the easily attainable knowledge on his life and work. From Péan, the Jacmel origins of Beaulieu are clarified, as well as his experience as a migrant worker in the Dominican Republic. Going there to work on railway construction, presumably Beaulieu continued to work for railroads or was employed by sugar plantations. Then, ending up at Columbia University to study teaching, Beaulieu returned to Haiti. According to Péan, he played a role in the 1929 strike at Damien and was involved in various schools and educational reform movements in the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, Beaulieu was a pivotal figure in the early promotion of Haitian Creole for education of the masses, and was involved in launching different schools in Port-au-Prince and teaching in Jacmel.

Unfortunately, Péan does not go into the specifics of Beaulieu's published writing on Haitian Creole education or reforms in L'école réelle. However, one can infer it was likely informed by his left-wing politics, training at Columbia University, and his experiences with teaching  in Port-au-Prince. Beaulieu's importance in terms of the legacy of the PSP and its newspaper, La Nation, cannot be denied, either. Thus, Beaulieu's significance in terms of the Haitian Left's interest in the uplift or education of the masses shaped the PSP militants and their successors for the next several decades.

 Bibliography

Beaulieu, Christian. "Caste et Classe." Le Nouvelliste (Port-au-Prince), July 28-29, 1942.

Hector, Michel. 1989. Syndicalisme et socialisme en Haïti: 1932-1970. Port-au-Prince, Haïti: Impr. H. Deschamps.

 Leslie Péan, « Du côté de la liberté – Christian Beaulieu », Le Petit Samedi Soir, no. 320, 12-18 janvier 1980.

Roumain, Jacques. Analyse schématique (1932-1934) et autres textes scientifiques. 2016. <http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/roumain_jacques/analyse_schematique/analyse_schematique.html>.

Smith, Matthew J. Red & Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.