Juste Chanlatte walks the tightrope between revolution and remembrance, his name inked not just in the proclamations of emperors but in the trembling birth certificate of a black republic. He emerges from colonial Saint-Domingue, a free man of color navigating a world that insists he be less. In 1791, he picks up a musket, but not for independence—at least, not yet. He fights for the civil rights of his class, for the right to stand among men who believe themselves masters of the world. But history, indifferent to half-measures, drags him beyond that. And when the gunfire stills, when the battle smoke clears, it is not the rifle but the pen that he keeps in hand.
He scripts the orders of Dessalines, the decrees of Christophe, the laws of a nation that never stops being an idea in conflict with itself. In the salons of Cap-Haïtien, he moves between policy and poetry, crafting operettas while shaping the codes that will govern a people free but unmoored. When Christophe falls, the grand court crumbles, but Chanlatte does not. He bends, adjusts, survives. He serves an emperor, a king, a republic—never at the center, but always in the room.
And yet, history does what it so often does to men like him. It judges him through the lens of France, the same France that could never quite bring itself to write for men like him, let alone about them with any fidelity. His words, once law, once lyric, become footnotes. The scholars who later write of him do so with a casual disdain, a dismissal wrapped in the language of critique.
But the past does not sleep easy in Haiti. Chanlatte’s story, like Haiti’s own, remains restless. His words shaped the laws of a black republic daring to exist in a world that had already written its obituary. And though the world may have chosen to forget, though even Haiti has, at times, struggled to remember, history is stubborn. And so, Juste Chanlatte remains.