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Unpublished Signed 1790 Manuscript Defending the Saint-Marc Assembly, by Deputy Hanus de Jumécourt

Hanus de Jumécourt

[Signed MS.] Discours prononcé à l’assemblée paroissiale de la Croix des Bouquets dans sa séance du dimanche du 30 mai 1790.

[La Croix-des-Bouquets?]: [30 May 1790]. Signed manuscript. Contemporary written record in a secretarial hand in brown ink on laid paper. With cancellations and corrections. Unbound. [8] pp., folio (ca. 375 × 225 mm). Creased, tanned slightly discolored mainly at the edges. Otherwise in fine condition.

A contemporary signed manuscript to our knowledge unpublished: a constitutionalist defense of the recently formed Saint-Marc Assembly, delivered at a moment of both high ambition and growing scrutiny by deputy Hanus de Jumécourt.

A rare and politically important manuscript, apparently unpublished, recording a speech delivered by Charles-Arnould-Ignace Hanus de Jumécourt (1749–1798) at the parish assembly of La Croix-des-Bouquets (Saint-Domingue), during its Sunday session on 30 May 1790. Signed by Hanus himself.

The speech was given shortly after Hanus’s election as deputy to the newly established Assemblée Générale de Saint-Marc, the colony’s short-lived representative body created in April 1790. As mayor and commander of La Croix-des-Bouquets, Hanus used this parish address—one of the Assembly’s local constituencies—to reinforce support and respond to doubts about its legitimacy.

Delivered only weeks after the Assembly’s creation, the address offers a constitutional defense of its mission, denouncing metropolitan interference, administrative abuses, and the erosion of local rights. Hanus rejects as “absurde et impraticable” the proposals for colonial independence—though acknowledging that such ideas briefly attracted attention—instead emphasizing the colony’s indispensable economic role to France: “[La colonie] fait circuler annuellement dans son sein près de 200 millions […] dans la balance du commerce général de l’Europe peut-être plus de 60 millions de bénéfice net.” [“The colony circulates nearly 200 million annually and contributes perhaps over 60 million in net profit to Europe’s general balance of trade.”]

He concludes with a call for unity and loyalty: “Tous Français, tous frères, jurons de nouveau une fidélité inviolable à la nation française, à la loi et au Roi des Français.” [“All Frenchmen, all brothers, let us once again swear inviolable loyalty to the French nation, the law, and the King of the French.”]

Born in Nancy in 1749, Charles-Arnould-Ignace Hanus de Jumécourt came from a family ennobled in 1716. A chevalier and captain in the royal artillery, he married Marie-Madeleine Mathieu-Descloches at Nantes in 1780. In 1786 he moved to Saint-Domingue, and after resigning his commission in 1789, settled at La Croix-des-Bouquets near Port-au-Prince, where his wife’s father owned a sugar plantation. In April 1790 he was elected a deputy to the Assembly of Saint-Marc and served simultaneously as mayor and militia commander of La Croix-des-Bouquets. Known for his moderate stance toward free people of color during the 1791 uprisings, he was arrested in 1793, later collaborated with the British during their occupation of Port-au-Prince, and died in exile in Jamaica in 1798. (Source: Généalogie et Histoire de la Caraïbe, Bulletin 98, novembre 1997, p. 2054.)

A valuable primary source from the early constitutional crisis in Saint-Domingue, capturing the rhetoric of the colony’s white leadership at a moment when the Assembly sought to defend its legitimacy—before its confrontation with Governor Peynier and the political rupture that, within a year, would lead to the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution.

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Price: €3,000.00