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FRENCH CONNECTION :Exhibit celebrates Haiti's historical ties to Louisiana

Sunday, May 07, 2006

By Bruce Eggler

Staff writer

The Historic New Orleans Collection announces a celebration of the connections between Louisiana and St. Domingue (Haiti).

Featuring a groundbreaking exhibition from March 14-June 30, 2006, an accompanying catalogue, symposium, lectures, and educational activities, this year?s programming promises to enthrall both residents and tourists.

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he Historic New Orleans Collection has a problem.

Defying the odds, and perhaps common sense, the French Quarter history museum and research center has mounted a major international exhibition in a city still reeling from Hurricane Katrina, where tourists are few and nearly all residents have concerns far more pressing than events that happened 200 or more years ago in the former French colony of St. Domingue, now the Caribbean nation of Haiti.

Yet museum officials felt obligated to go ahead with the show, "Common Routes: St. Domingue-Louisiana," especially after all the foreign governments and archives previously scheduled to lend objects recommitted to the exhibition after Katrina -- a demonstration of support for New Orleans.

It was "a faith-affirming act," said John Lawrence, the collection's director of museum programs and a co-curator of the St. Domingue show.

Twenty-five institutional lenders and 11 individuals provided 150 objects covering 350 years. All but five are originals, and they date as far back as a 1493 letter from Spain's Queen Isabella, a 1504 papal bull from Julius II creating the diocese of Santo Domingo and pre-Columbian artifacts of the Taino Indians, who inhabited the island that contains Haiti and the Dominican Republic before Europeans arrived and nearly wiped them out.

The French government even agreed to send objects to New Orleans that it has now put under permanent embargo, meaning they will never be sent abroad again, said Priscilla Lawrence, the local museum's executive director.

One lender, the General Archive of the Indies in Seville, Spain, did take a bit of coaxing, collection officials admit.

After seeing what Katrina did to New Orleans, the Spanish officials wanted assurance that another major hurricane was not going to hit the city during the exhibition's run, March 14 to June 30. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration agreed to send a letter officially stating that a major storm has never struck New Orleans that early in the year.

One of the show's more haunting objects is a 1726 watercolor of the 8-year-old colonial town of la Nouvelle Orleans, as it was rebuilt after the devastating hurricane of 1722. The oldest known depiction of the city, it is the work of French surveyor Jean-Pierre de Lassus, who also worked in St. Domingue.

But having pulled the exhibition together, and convinced that it illustrates important and little-recognized aspects of the histories of both New Orleans and the French and Spanish colonial empires in the New World, the museum now faces the problem of trying to find an audience for it.

Plans to have large numbers of school groups visit the show had to be canceled after Katrina, and adult museum-goers are far fewer than they were before the storm.

Yet people who do drop into the museum at 533 Royal St. are likely to learn many surprising things about the former French colony and its deeply intertwined relationships with New Orleans.

Just for starters, the show brings together a remarkably varied cast of characters, ranging from Napoleon Bonaparte, Andrew Jackson and various early New Orleans mayors to chess champion Paul Morphy, artist John James Audubon, "Three Musketeers" author Alexandre Dumas, voodoo queen Marie Laveau and jewelry designer Mignon Faget.

During the 18th century, as historian John Garrigus writes in the exhibition catalog, "the colony of St. Domingue was the most valuable possession of any European power. The jewel of France's New World empire, St. Domingue was the world's largest sugar and coffee producer, and it ranked second only to Brazil in the importation of enslaved Africans."

It was a center of learning and culture, with its own hospital, university, cathedral and branch of the Academie Française. It was also, in the words of historian Thomas Fiehrer, the "parent colony" of French Louisiana, which it nourished through "trade, communication and migration."

Slave uprising

Everything began to fall apart in 1791. Two years after the start of the French Revolution, St. Domingue's huge population of black slaves revolted, killing their masters, burning plantations and attacking the colony's cities.

Many of St. Domingue's white residents and free people of color fled, initially to Cuba and other Caribbean and Latin havens, and also to U.S. eastern ports such as Philadelphia and Charleston, S.C., rather than to New Orleans. The city then was under Spanish rule, but it was returned to French control by a secret treaty in 1800.

In 1802, Napoleon sent a large army to reconquer the colony and restore slavery, which had been abolished after the revolt began. The failure of that expedition led to his decision to sell the Louisiana Territory, which he saw as only a minor adjunct to the potentially far more valuable Caribbean possession.

Although Congress had prohibited the importation of slaves into the United States in 1808, Louisiana Gov. William C.C. Claiborne decided in 1809 to admit St. Domingue refugees and their slaves, especially a sizable group just expelled from Cuba.

Thousands of St. Dominguans -- white people, black slaves and free people of color -- quickly poured into New Orleans, reinvigorating its French culture despite the new American government, and at the same time strengthening its Caribbean ties.

"The intellectual and cultural capital brought to Louisiana by former residents of St. Domingue may never fully be measured," co-curators Alfred Lemmon and John Lawrence write in the exhibition catalog.

From "Birds of America" artist Audubon and the founders of many of New Orleans' newspapers to celebrated pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk, chess genius Morphy and prominent figures in medicine and architecture, Lemmon and Lawrence write, "first- and second-generation émigrés of all races and social classes imbued New Orleans with a cultural dye distinctive enough to withstand the homogenizing effects of the melting pot. If Louisianians remain Frenchmen at heart, two centuries after the Purchase, St. Domingue émigrés deserve much of the credit."

The evidence for that claim is laid out in the Historic New Orleans Collection show, for those who manage to see it.

One caution: Because the labels identifying the objects on view are skimpy, the best way to see the show is on a guided tour. Or be prepared to spend a lot of time studying the informational cards available in baskets in each room.

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Bruce Eggler can be reached at beggler@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3320.