A rare and lovely survival of this pre-Revolutionary Saint-Domingue imprint.
Reporting on the election in the parish of Croix-des-Bouquets, dated 25 July, 1790, it declares that M. du Buc-Saint-Olympe was elected to head office while M. Petit de Villiers continued as secretary.
Yet the real business of this Extrait concerns the rebellious Assembly at Saint-Marc. It states that after the events on Saint-Domingue following 13 June, “ladite Assemblée paroissiale reconnoit que l’Assemblée générale de Saint-marc manifeste de plus en plus son esprit d’indépendance, ainsi que le prjet d’une scission avec la France.” [The said Parish Assembly recognises that the General Assembly of Saint-Marc is increasingly demonstrating its spirit of independence, as well as its intention to secede from France.]
It then goes on to list eight examples of the Assembly of Saint-Marc contravening governmental decrees before stating that the parish of Croix-des-Bouquets does not recognise the Assembly of Saint-Marc as it does not conform in any way to the national decree of the 8th and 28th of last March, both of which concerned France’s Caribbean colonies. There follows another eleven articles censuring Saint-Marc.
Charles-Théodore Mozard (1755-1810) was both a journalist and a printer. He was awarded the royal imprimerie in 1788 and edited the Affiches Américaines between 1783 and 1790. He was also involved in the publication of Gazette de Saint-Domingue, and the Almanach général de Saint-Domingue. In the first months of the Haitian Revolution, his press was burned to the ground and he departed Saint-Domingue shortly thereafter and arrived in Paris in 1792. Two years later he was back in the Americas, this time as the French consul to Boston, a position that he held until 1799.
OCLC locates a single copy at JCB.
