Sylvain vs. La Selve
In addition to teaching and writing, La Selve began to construct an enterprise that would allow him and his family to retire peacefully to his posh villa in the Paris suburb of Courbevoie. The enterprise took the form of an organization bearing the grand title of the Association Universelle, better known as the Académie des Palmiers. He described it as a “humanitarian, scientific, artistic and literary society” focused on “expanding French literature and encouraging educational travels, the cult of courtesy, and the abolition of slavery, the guillotine and war.” To support these lofty endeavours, La Selve devised a scheme that ultimately proved to be his undoing. The Académie’s modus operandi was to conscript new members from among the elites of French society, foreign heads of state, and, in particular, notables from Africa and the Caribbean. Without their knowledge, they would be added to the Académie’s membership list and asked to contribute a subscription fee. In return they would be given a title, decorated with a quadricolour rosette, and could have their image and a laudatory biography printed in the Académie’s periodical, the Revue exotique, for which La Selve served as editor.
In 1890, several members of Paris’s Haitian community received notice that they had been made members of the Académie des Palmiers. One of these was the Benito Sylvain. He received word that the Académie had granted him a medal of honour, but he did not reply. At this point, Sylvain was only vaguely aware of La Selve, who, as he wrote simply in September 1890, was “well known in Haiti.” A few months later, Sylvain read that La Fraternité was listed among the newspapers affiliated with the Revue exotique. By this point, however, Sylvain had learned “some unfavourable things” about La Selve, and he wrote a brief article stressing that La Fraternité was in no way connected to him. This initial exchange quickly erupted into fourteen months of mudslinging between Sylvain and La Selve. The conflict tarnished the latter’s reputation and may well have contributed to his untimely death. For our purposes, this mutual smear campaign can be read as a battle to define Haiti. La Selve had established himself as an authority on the country, popularizing ideas about Haiti that had existed in France for nearly a century. Sylvain, for his part, came to see La Selve as an enemy of Haiti who was propagating a caricature of the country and exploiting his connection to it to enrich himself.
After Sylvain’s initial disavowal, the tone of the conflict shifts markedly. La Selve responded with a letter full of insults against La Fraternité, threatening Sylvain with legal action. By this point, Sylvain had decided what type of man La Selve was, and the value of his opinions. In his next issue, he declared that La Selve was an “exploiter of Haiti,” and a “total hater of the Black race.” He said, “we are proud of the insults Mr. La Selve has hurled at us; the outrage of certain men is a certificate of dignity that bolsters us.” In the following issue, Sylvain continued his counterattack by reprinting a series of documents intended to unveil La Selve as a con artist and an enemy of Haiti and the Black race. These included a letter from the French senator from Guadeloupe, Alexandre Isaac, who had been enlisted as a member of the Académie, but who now declared that “if Mr. La Selve, whom I’ve never had the honour to meet, was, sometime in the past, one of the detractors of our race, I want it to be well understood that there is nothing in common with him and me.” Sylvain reproduced excerpts from French and Haitian newspapers that mocked the Académie’s practice of awarding of titles and laudatory biographies as a money-making scheme, and questioned the legality of granting decorations, claiming it infringed on the prerogatives of the State. Finally, Sylvain penned a brief commentary on Général Cocoyo as an indictment of the man and his attitudes toward Haiti. He reproduced the lines from the novel’s introduction that called Haiti “the bloody scrap of African barbarity,” and referred to a time when La Selve had described Parisian Haitians as “flashy foreigners [“rastaquouères”] with hair of wool and skin the colour of shoe polish.” Sylvain concluded the piece with a plea to his compatriots not to be deceived. Clearly, he was now set on unmasking La Selve, damaging his reputation and thereby delegitimizing his authority to speak about Haiti.
After Sylvain methodically dismantled his standing as a trusted authority on Haiti, La Selve resorted to ad hominem attacks on Sylvain, couched in racists imagery. The next edition of Revue exotique, included a brief reply to Sylvain. It described Sylvain as an “orang-outan who is playing at journalism,” and called La Fraternité “a banana leaf.” It characterized Sylvain as a “kicking like a crazed ass against Revue exotique and the Académie des Palmiers,” concluding that “his blustering backside is lost in the air,” and that such a person “inspires disgust and only collects hatred.” This type of mudslinging was not uncommon in the late nineteenth-century press, but it surely must have lost La Selve the higher ground, and further eroded his standing as a spokesperson for Haiti. Intended as a cool rebuff to salvage his reputation, it must have had the opposite result.
Sylvain then opted for a direct approach. Since the article had no byline, Sylvain sent two Haitian friends with a private letter inquiring whether La Selve was responsible for the “orang-outan” comment. La Selve’s only response was to return the letter, “covered in…”—the ellipses implying it was soiled in human excrement. Sylvain’s messengers reported, saying,
They congratulated Sylvain for “putting an end, at least we hope, to this wretch’s disgusting commerce.” Sylvain related this development in the following issue of La Fraternité, saying, “may that term ‘Orang-utan,’ which Mr. La Selve used as an insult, inspire healthy reflections within all those of our race who were in some way affiliated with this grotesque Académie des Palmiers!” Withing two months, Sylvain was thrilled to receive word from Port-au-Prince that many of his compatriots had pulled out of the Académie.perhaps he just wanted to demonstrate the great emotion he felt while reading our note. In any case, we would spit and spit again in the face of the lowlife who calls himself La Selve, the repugnant and pitiful, who imagined living shamefully off of our compatriots—thanks to his bewildering Société des Palmiers and its fanciful awards—after having badmouthed our country in books that, furthermore, are unread, because they are written by a cobbler…
Several months later, in January 1892, Sylvain announced that resignations were raining down on the Académie after Demesvar Delorme, the respected Haitian minister to Berlin, refused to join and received public abuse from La Selve. In February, Sylvain reported a general desertion, noting several high-profile resignations, and proclaiming that, “the Académie des Palmiers is dying! The Académie des Palmiers is dead!”. In March, Sylvain announced that the Académie’s impending bankruptcy; “this great sham of an enterprise,” he said, “is thus approaching death.” La Selve, in turn, publicly criticized the Haitian government for subsidizing La Fraternité, which, he said, “renders no service to the country, nor to the Black race,” adding, furthermore, that no one was interested in Sylvain’s poppycock. He added derogatorily that Sylvain must be receiving help from a white man in polishing up his prose. Finally, in a desperate effort to save his role as a spokesperson for Haiti, he suggested that the government should pull its funding from La Fraternité, and instead support his own paper.
Sylvain replied to these harsh words in his final attack against La Selve. In the issue of La Fraternité of the first week of April 1892, he wrote an article subtitled (chillingly, in the light of subsequent events) “Despair of a Blackmailer, Vengeance of a dying man, Edgar’s last cry.” He declared that La Selve’s claims about La Fraternité were entirely unfounded; La Fraternité enjoyed a strong readership and the idea that the Haitian government should support the Revue exotique was preposterous, particularly since it “flatters our government clumsily and publishes portraits of the heroes of our independence that are total fantasy—when they are not frightful caricatures.” Sylvain concluded by predicting that this would be the last word from La Selve, who would soon be forced to shut down his agency and return to the region of his birth to take up his original career—“digging for truffles.” “May this sad ending,” he added, “serve as a lesson for the present and future detractors of Haiti and of the Black race!”.
As it turned out, Sylvain’s predictions, were not far off. It was, indeed, La Selve’s final cry. Weeks later, on 26 April 1892, Edgar La Selve took his own life at the age of forty-three by shooting himself in the head in the headquarters of Société des Gens de Lettres in Paris. A note in his pocket explained the circumstance that had led to his suicide. He wrote: “I sense that my intellectual faculties are decreasing more and more, and I no longer have the strength to face the future.” But it is hard to imagine that Sylvain’s tireless campaign against him and the corresponding collapse of the Académie des Palmiers did not play a role in La Selve’s decline. Sylvain, for his part, commented that “Edgar La Selve—as is known to our readers—was one of the cruelest detractors of Haiti and of the Black race. But all resentment must fall before the dead, and it is with a heart full of immense pity that we wish for peace for his poor soul!”. Clearly, this was a tragic finale to the war or words between Sylvain and La Selve. At the same time, it palpably and publicly demonstrated how far Sylvain was willing to go to oppose the detractors of Haiti and the Black race. On a more pragmatic level, this salacious series of events undoubtedly also helped La Fraternité sell more copies and boost the overall financial viability and cultural prominence of his paper and of the Black Republic of Letters in general.