Abstract:

This paper discusses the outstanding process of political effervescence seen in Haiti during the nineteenth century, after the revolution of slaves in the French colony by a bloody fight for emancipation, delivering to its illiterate people written constitutions in the period between 1801 and 1816 and, supposedly, the freedom by the way of a Constituent Assembly. Those documents astonishes as they are riches on fundamental (and even social) rights and guarantees, much more forcefully than later seen in the Americas or even in Europe. Important scholars gave fair attention for that on history and social studies, but the same doesn't occur in Law, and even less in constitutional law. The main argument of this article is that the suppression of the insurgency also perpetuates it with the subsequent constitutional silent about the episode and that this silence remains, unjustifiably, nowadays between the constitutional scholars studying popular constitutionalism and fundamental rights.

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