DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE PDF FREE
Let us walk down another path let us imitate those people who, extending their concern into the future, and dreading to leave an example of cowardice for posterity, preferred to be exterminated rather than lose their place as one of the world's free peoples. Let us leave this description for the French they have conquered but are no longer free. What people fought for us? What people wanted to gather the fruits of our labor? And what dishonorable absurdity to conquer in order to be enslaved. Let us imitate the grown child: his own weight breaks the boundary that has become an obstacle to him. We have dared to be free, let us be thus by ourselves and for ourselves. Let them tremble when they approach our coast, if not from the memory of those cruelties they perpetrated here, then from the terrible resolution that we will have made to put to death anyone born French whose profane foot soils the land of liberty.
What are you waiting for before appeasing their spirits? Remember that you had wanted your remains to rest next to those of your fathers, after you defeated tyranny will you descend into their tombs without having avenged them? No! Their bones would reject yours.Īnd you, precious men, intrepid generals, who, without concern for your own pain, have revived liberty by shedding all your blood, know that you have done nothing if you do not give the nations a terrible, but just example of the vengeance that must be wrought by a people proud to have recovered its liberty and jealous to maintain it let us frighten all those who would dare try to take it from us again let us begin with the French. Instead of these dear victims, your alarmed gaze will see only their assassins, these tigers still dripping with their blood, whose terrible presence indicts your lack of feeling and your guilty slowness in avenging them. Indeed! Look there for your children, your suckling infants, what have they become?. Native citizens, men, women, girls, and children, let your gaze extend on all parts of this island: look there for your spouses, your husbands, your brothers, your sisters. What! Victims of our credulity and indulgence for 14 years defeated not by French armies, but by the pathetic eloquence of their agents' proclamations when will we tire of breathing the air that they breathe? What do we have in common with this nation of executioners? The difference between its cruelty and our patient moderation, its color and ours the great seas that separate us, our avenging climate, all tell us plainly that they are not our brothers, that they never will be, and that if they find refuge among us, they will plot again to trouble and divide us. Indeed! There are still French in our island, and you believe yourself free and independent of that Republic which, it is true, has fought all the nations, but which has never defeated those who wanted to be free. let these sacred words unite us and be the signal of battle and of our reunion.Ĭitizens, my countrymen, on this solemn day I have brought together those courageous soldiers who, as liberty lay dying, spilled their blood to save it these generals who have guided your efforts against tyranny have not yet done enough for your happiness the French name still haunts our land.Įverything revives the memories of the cruelties of this barbarous people: our laws, our habits, our towns, everything still carries the stamp of the French.
In the end we must live independent or die. We must, with one last act of national authority, forever assure the empire of liberty in the country of our birth we must take any hope of re-enslaving us away from the inhuman government that for so long kept us in the most humiliating torpor.
It is not enough to have expelled the barbarians who have bloodied our land for two centuries it is not enough to have restrained those ever-evolving factions that one after another mocked the specter of liberty that France dangled before you. The Commander in Chief to the People of Haiti The following is a translation of the document by Laurent Dubois and John Garrigus as published in " Slave Revolution in the Caribbean 1789 - 1804: A Brief History with Documents." The Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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