1778-00-00: (Jules Solime Milscent, Born in Grande-Rivière du Nord, Haitian Poet and Fabulist Whose Literary Work Celebrated the Revolution in the French Rom…

1778-00-00: (Jules Solime Milscent, Born in Grande-Rivière du Nord, Haitian Poet and Fabulist Whose Literary Work Celebrated the Revolution in the French Romantic Tradition, Co-Founder of L’Abeille Haytienne, Killed by the Same Earthquake That Destroyed Cap-Haïtien in 1842): Jules Solime Milscent was born in 1778 in Grande-Rivière du Nord, the son of a French father and a free Black mother. Educated at university in France, he returned to Haiti and cofounded the periodical L’Abeille Haytienne in 1817, one of the young republic’s earliest literary journals. Like most of the first generation of Haitian writers, Milscent devoted his art to the glory and heroism of the Revolution, the event that had defined his nation and his generation. But he wrote in the literary idiom of France, the romanticism, realism, and symbolism prevalent in nineteenth-century French letters, which meant that Haitian literature was born speaking in its colonizer’s tongue about the experience of overthrowing that colonizer. His best-remembered works are his fables, including Le Chien et le Loup and L’Enfant et la Sauterelle. Milscent died on May 7, 1842, when the massive 7.7 magnitude earthquake leveled Cap-Haïtien, killing over ten thousand people. The earthquake took him, but the literary tradition he helped establish, the insistence that Haitian experience was worthy of art, survived.