Comments by "William Innes" (@williaminnes6635) on "Styxhexenhammer666"
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Kind of.
At the beginning of the French Revolution, the first wave of revolutionaries decreed an end to slavery, including in the French empire outside of France.
At that point, the Haitians were probably the world's most enthusiastic French citizens.
Later, a different group of French revolutionaries realized that they really needed the money from sugar sales to fund the wars that broke out against Prussia, Russia, Austria, Britain, Portugal, and later Spain.
(The French really pissed in everybody's coffee around the turn of the 19th century.)
Napoleon sent Rochambeau to Haiti with the mission of suppressing the (fairly understandable) resistance the Haitians had to being told it was time to go back to being slaves.
Dessalines was a maniac, but Rochambeau became the name of the South Park game of kick the other guy in the nuts for a reason, because that was his strategy for convincing people who had just been told they were free that they had to go back to being slaves.
The guy literally invented a primitive version of the gas chamber to execute Haitians he suspected were involved with arming the Haitian revolutionaries.
He'd burn sulfur in the holds of ships to suffocate people.
He'd put nails in barrels and use them to roll people down hills.
So, the mass lynchings of French and collaborationist Haitian planters LOOK nasty in those old cartoons, but...people were pissed.
Really it's more similar to the War in the Vendee, except that the French central government was too weak to pull off a full genocide the way they were able to in what became mainland France. Partially this was because of the distance, partially because the Royal Navy went back and forth from helping the French when it looked like the Haitian Revolution would make problems in British possessions to helping the Haitian revolutionaries when it looked like a great way to grief the French - smaller version of what the French did to the British in America. The American Revolution just wasn't quite as barbaric as the French Revolution.
The psychological thing was almost as bad as the indemnity.
Given how nasty the war was, once Louverture got in, there was no way of convincing the average person to go back to working on a plantation. That was the only way they could have kept up their exports, because sugar was the one thing they were set up to produce.
In a world where the later French revolutionaries had decided to keep slavery off the books, Haiti would have probably developed as a standard banana republic. They would have had a sharecrop economy for a century and change then gradually diversified. It'd be an upper middle income nation today. If you told somebody from that timeline our timeline's version of what happened, it would sound insane to them, and if they were from Haiti, they'd probably take it as an insult.
Even had somebody who wasn't as brutal as Rochambeau been sent by Napoleon, it would still have been possible to convince the average person to work as a sharecropper.
but after all the shit they went through because of Rochambeau?
They weren't going to do that.
and that meant you then had a century plus where instead of exporting something, they exported nothing.
The tertiary tragedy of the way the Haitian Revolution happened - besides the horrific atrocities and destroying Haiti's exports for a hundred years - was that when the early French revolutionaries declared an end to slavery, in 1792 IIRC, the debate on slavery had just entered Common as a result of Wilberforce pushing it.
The argument got made to see how it would work out for the French before rushing in.
Then the wars with France distracted Commons from the issue until 1815, and it was just sort of forgotten until 1834, when, after a frenzy of changes to the way the system was set up started by getting rid of electoral districts where everybody was on the take, the decision was finally made to get rid of it.
In other words, it was the initial catalyst for delay. Slavery might have ended 42 years earlier in the British Empire had things gone differently. That might have meant pressure on Spain and Portugal got started earlier.
Titbit number four, the first wave of refugees welcomed by the United States as an independent country were Haitians and Frenchmen fleeing the Haitian Revolution. This was because South Carolina and North Carolina had disproportionately been settled by planters who had failed at growing sugar in the Caribbean, and who were automatically sympathetic to Haitian and French planters who lost their plantations during the Haitian Revolution.
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tangent
I forget the name of the Indian master Buddhist who came to China and was convinced by Huike of his devotion to Buddhism by Huike cutting off his own arm in front of him. edit - Bodhidharma, but I had to write out the rest of the story to make me remember
They always draw him as obviously foreign in the monastery frescoes - big bulging eyes, wild beard, crazed grimace.
I sort of imagine Bodhidharma looking at Huike and going "holy fuck, man, you just cut off your fucking arm! All right, all right, I'll stop trying to convince you I'm an impressive religious master and let you be my top disciple."
anyway legend goes Huike meditated in one of the caverns up in the mountains so long the force of his concentration burned an image of him into the cavern walls
then the other folk religion character that got picked up by the version of Buddhism that came to be associated with the better know schools of traditional Chinese martial arts was Vajrapani, where the theory is that Vajrapani was originally just Hercules, to whom Bactrians and other central Asian people had continued to pray to after the diadochii - the ancient Macedonian generals who divided up the empire of Alexander the Great - as a god of strength. Buddhism as it passed through central Asia from India, the argument goes, picked up basically any folk deity it could consider to be a supernatural entity inferior to Buddha himself who acted with the overall purpose of helping people to enlightenment, and Hercules became associated with one of the Buddhist analogies about how keeping yourself detached from worldly concerns was like wiping the dust off of a reflective surface, hence the character bearing a diamond that shot lightning - forget the language, might be Sanskrit, but Vajrapani the name means "lightning diamond." Five dollar word for the day is "eponymous." As schools of martial arts began to follow Vajrapani as their monastery sub-deity, eventually the diamond in his hand began to be replaced by a quarterstaff, since Buddhist monks to show what they were carried a staff with them with a ring in the top, so a stick was a weapon to which they always had access, and stick fighting became strongly associated with monasteries which focused on martial arts. Typing this out, I sort of wonder if maybe this might have been the result of a Buddhist having encountered a depiction of Hercules carrying the club of Hercules. This would be a twelve foot shaft usually of ash IIRC for monastery drills, but during the later medieval campaigns against pirates from Japan, the monks used eight foot iron staves which were more lethal. The stories related to the exceptions the martial arts monasteries made for meat, alcohol, and women are more along the lines of "well I had a dream that the Buddha told me that it was OK if we ate animal sinews to gain strength, so our abbey makes an exception to the Buddhist monastic code." When a tradition needs to come up with an excuse to say why it is OK for high T guys to act like high T guys, it comes up with an excuse. (I actually can cite my source on this one, everything here is in Meir Shahar's compilation of essays related to his translations of rubbings he took of inscriptions on stele erected around Shaolin Abbey in mainland China in the 1990s and 2000s.)
TL; DR, we have the same thing to thank for how we know the Indian caste system is relatively "modern" as we do for the existence of kung fu
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and to anybody who reads this and decides they want to get into it, learn Sanskrit, try to get a hold of a copy of the Buddhist monastic code, the vinaya, and learn it cover to cover, try to pick up some Japanese, and keep your day job
At that point, you've got the skill set East Asian studies Ph Ds with funding for a grad student want to see to begin to vouch for why your slave wage labour for them ought to be worth a college saying you have a Master's degree, and beginning to point you at stuff in the vinaya and interpretations of it that other people have not studied recently, which is how you're going to get a dissertation out of it.
Don't take courses not related to Sanskrit or the vinaya until you've got that shit down like the back of your hand.
Japanese because the best archives in the world for the Eastern Tradition are in Japan.
Japan only started keeping its own set of records in the 5th century after Christ, but they're the one place where the wars didn't burn them to the ground or the weather didn't turn them to soil or the scholars didn't turn to apathy and cynicism, so they have the most complete set of records related to the Eastern Tradition.
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