La vocation de l’élite

"Comment expliquer que nous en soyons arrivés à une telle division sociale que notre élite semble être un organisme étranger, superposé au reste de la nation et vivant par rapport au peuple dans un état équivoque de parasitisme?"

Tragically, Jean Price-Mars's La vocation de l’élite remains relevant to the Haiti of a century later. After losing her sovereignty again during the post-2004 years, Price-Mars's call for the elite to fulfill their obligation to the nation is strikingly prescient. Moreover, Price-Mars, a century ago, was calling attention to the contradictions of the Haitian Revolution, the very contradictions of Toussaint Louverture and successive governments in Haiti that scholars have established their reputations by repeating ad nauseam  in the century after La vocation de l’élite. While some chapters are less immediately pertinent to the problems of Haiti today, the pressing problem of social cohesion and resolving the distance between the masses and the elites remains intractable as the country finds itself in the mire of another crisis.

What is most intriguing about the text is the question of leadership. Price-Mars, who inherited the Haitian intellectual traditions of the 19th century through Firmin, Janvier, Hannibal Price, and Delorme, questioned the social utility of an elite which has not accomplished anything for the masses. While Price-Mars sees the masses as incapable of leading themselves out of their morass of ignorance, misery, and superstition (perhaps because, as Gustave Le Bon argued, the crowd is fundamentally irrational), cooperation between elite and mass is necessary for any future progress. Indeed, according to Price-Mars, such a collaboration  made Haiti possible in the first place. Nonetheless, the elite, the classe dirigeante, who descend from the colonial affranchis and military generals of the Revolution, should have represented and commanded Haiti in such a manner that led to the alleviation of the conditions for the mass. Perhaps due to the inheritance of elitist forms of Haitian liberalism of the previous century, Price-Mars appears to have no problem with an enlightened subset of the population ruling in the interests of the masses, something Delorme would have likely agreed with.

However, democracy was the goal for Price-Mars. This was a democracy in which everyone can reach their maximum potential, where the City would be one where Reason has overthrown the brutal injustices of society. These republican ideals, however, were a farce in a Haiti where the masses were illiterate, excluded, exploited, and the descendants of the enslaved masses of Saint-Domingue wallowed in an unjust social order. The elite, to Price-Mars, again echoing Delorme, should demonstrate the intellectual, practical, educational, industrial, or agricultural skills that act in the interest of their nation, which would justify their existence in Price-Mars's ideal City. Instead, the elite have become a parasitical entity which exploits the peasantry through the impôt on coffee, the demwatye system, and exploitation of their credulity to profit from the state. These are the characteristics of an elite unfit to rule, who will not bridge the gap they have created between themselves and the masses.

Due to the failure of Haitians of the upper-class to collaborate with the ongoing caco revolts of the 1910s against the US Occupation, one can see how La vocation de l’élite must have stirred debate among the audiences who first heard Price-Mars's lectures. Given the context of the US Occupation caused Haitians to search inward for causes and solutions to the predicament of the first Black Republic's loss of sovereignty, and the politics of Haiti’s elite, it's no surprise that the author assumed the masses must be tutored by the elite to restore national independence. Instead of, say, pursuing a Marxist route where the salvation of Haiti lay in the rural and urban workers, which may have been a little absurd in a society where the majority were peasants, Price-Mars envisioned a reformed elite guiding the masses onward into the 20th century. One can see the seeds of indigenisme, too, as folklore and cultural nationalism could become a useful tool in bringing together all social classes in Haitian society.

But what of leadership after La vocation de l’élite? We know the dark routes of noirist intellectuals, who borrowed from Price-Mars to reject in its entirety Western liberal democracy as unfit for Haiti. A topic of interest I would like to continue would be to explore the ways in which leadership in Haiti for radicals of the noirist or Marxist persuasions was shaped by or responded to Price-Mars. For instance, take Marxist notions of a vanguard among the Haitian Left. To what extent were Etienne Charlier, Roumain, Alexis, and Lamaute still trapped in the perspective of Price-Mars? How have noirist and Marxist intellectuals used Price-Mars's elucidation for social relations? It certainly seems like everyone is heavily indebted to the 1919 text. In spite of its class politics, it's one of the most searing critiques of the elite, yet it hopes to rely on that same social group for the salvation of Haiti. One wonders what this means for Haiti of today, as, undoubtedly, the voices of the masses are heard everywhere. Moreover, indigenisme has changed Haiti profoundly, but the vast chasm that separates the elite and mass has not changed.