Anténor Firmin
| Anténor Firmin | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Minister of Finance, Commerce and Foreign Affairs | |
| In office December 17, 1896 – July 26, 1897 |
|
| President | Tirésias Simon Sam |
| Preceded by | Callisthènes Fouchard (Finance and Commerce) Pourcely Faine (Foreign Affairs) |
| Succeeded by | Solon Ménos |
| In office October 29, 1889 – May 3, 1891 |
|
| President | Florvil Hyppolite |
| Preceded by | Saint-Martin Dupuy (Finance and Commerce) Himself (Foreign Affairs) |
| Succeeded by | Hugon Lechaud |
| Minister of Foreign Affairs, Agriculture and Worship | |
| In office August 22, 1889 – October 29, 1889 |
|
| President | Florvil Hyppolite |
| Preceded by | Saint-Martin Dupuy (Foreign Affairs) Néré Numa (Agriculture) Maximillien Laforest (Worship) |
| Succeeded by | Himself (Foreign Affairs) Clément Haentjens (Agriculture) Léger Cauvin (Worship) |
| Member of the provisional Government of the Republic of Haiti | |
| In office August 22, 1889 – October 9, 1889 |
|
| Personal details | |
| Born | Joseph Auguste Anténor Firmin 18 October 1850 Cap-Haïtien, Haiti |
| Died | Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist. Saint Thomas, DWI |
| Nationality | Haitian |
| Political party | Parti libéral |
| Spouse(s) | Marie Louise Victoria Rosa Salnave |
| Children | Anne-Marie Firmin Georges Anténor Firmin |
| Profession | Anthropologist, Egyptologist, Politician and Journalist |
Joseph Auguste Anténor Firmin (18 October 1850 – 19 September 1911), better known as simply Anténor Firmin, was a Haitian author, politician and diplomat.
Biography
Born into a modest family at Cap-Haitien, Haiti, Anténor Firmin completed his secondary education at the Lycée Philippe Guerrier in his hometown, and began teaching at the age of seventeen.
He worked as an employee in a store, as a teacher and then as a school inspector. Passionate about politics, he founded the newspaper Le Messager du Nord in Cap-Haïtien. An unsuccessful candidate in 1879 for the deputation, he was sent in 1883 as a representative of his country to the centennial celebrations of Simon Bolivar. Refusing a ministerial post under the presidency of Lysius Salomon, he went into exile in Saint Thomas and then in Paris (1885), where he met Louis-Joseph Janvier and was admitted on July 17, 1884 to the Society of Anthropology of Paris. In 1885, he published On the Equality of the Human Races, which is an attempt to rehabilitate the historical greatness of the black race from Egypt to Haiti, in reaction to Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–1855).
In 1889, he was appointed by President Florvil Hyppolite as Minister of Finance and External Relations. He left the cabinet in 1891 and moved to France. In 1900, he was appointed ambassador of Haiti to France.
Anténor Firmin ran for president at the end of the 19th century. As a minister of President Hyppolite in 1891, he resisted pressure from the United States, which wanted to set up a military base in Haiti at Môle-Saint-Nicolas. In 1905, his essay, Mr. Roosevelt, President of the United States and the Republic of Haiti had great repercussions, predicting an intervention of the American army, which in fact took place. Indeed, he wrote in his book The Effort in Evil: "Man, I can disappear, without seeing the dawn of a better day on the national horizon. However, even after my death, it will be necessary of two things one: either Haiti passes under a foreign domination, or it adopts resolutely the principles in the name of which I always fought and fought. For in the 20th century, and in the Western hemisphere, no people can live indefinitely under tyranny, injustice, ignorance and misery".
Thought
In his best known work, De l'égalité des races humaines (aka Of the Equality of Human Races) published in 1885, Firmin tackles two bases of existing theories on black inferiority in an effort to critique Gobineau's De l'Inégalité des Races Humaines. On the one hand Firmin challenges the idea of brain size or cephalic index as a measure of human intelligence and on the other he reasserts the presence of African Blacks in pharaonic Egypt. He then delves into the significance of the Haitian Revolution of 1804 and ensuing achievements of Haitians such as Léon Audain and Isaïe Jeanty in medicine and science and Edmond Paul in the social sciences. (Both Audain and Jeanty had obtained prizes from the Académie de Médecine de Paris.) [1]
Firmin is one of three Caribbean men who launched the idea of Pan-Africanism at the end of the 19th century to combat colonialism in Africa. As a candidate in Haiti's 1902 presidential elections, he declared that the Haitian state should "serve in the rehabilitation of Africa". Along with Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams and fellow Haitian Bénito Sylvain, he was the organizer of the Panafrican Conference which took place in London in 1900. That conference launched the Panafricanism movement. W.E.B. Dubois attended the conference and was put in charge of drafting the general report. After the conference, 5 panafrican congresses were held in the 20th century which eventually led to the creation of the African Union.[2]
He devised between 1875 and 1898 a Caribbean Confederation project which envisioned the unification of Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Puerto Rico.[2]
Works
- De l'égalité des races humaines. Anthropologie positive (1885)
- Haïti au point de vue politique, administratif et économique: conférence faite au Grand cercle de Paris, le 8 décembre 1891 (1891)
- Diplomate et diplomatie: lettre ouverte à M. Solon Ménos (1899)
- Lettre ouverte aux membres de la Société de Législation de Port-au-Prince (1904)
- M. Roosevelt, président des États-Unis et la République d'Haïti (1905)
- Études sociologiques, historiques et littéraires (1910)
- L'effort dans le mal, Port-au-Prince (1911)
- Lettres de Saint-Thomas : études sociologiques, historiques et littéraires (1910)
Notes
References
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- Joseph, Celucien L. From Toussaint to Price-Mars: Rhetoric, Race, and Religion in Haitian Thought (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013)
