Lisette quitté la plaine c. 1757

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In 1797, before the world had National Geographic or Netflix documentaries, Moreau de St. Méry (1750–1819), an exiled Frenchman living in Philadelphia, wrote the first in-depth study of France’s wealthiest colony, Saint-Domingue, colonial Haiti. This seminal text is a cross between an archival and ethnographic treatise on the colony’s history, society, economy, politics, and geography. In it, St. Méry argues that the Creole language in Saint-Domingue was more complex than was generally understood. To make his point, he transcribed the famous song Lisette quitté la plaine, which demonstrates an independent grammar and unique ways of expressing its story.

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St. Méry tells his readers that the song was written forty years earlier, in 1757, by a prominent French colonist named Marthe Jérôme Duvivier de la Mahautière, who served on the judicial council of Port-au-Prince. Archival marriage and property records in France and Saint-Domingue confirm that De la Mahautière came from a wealthy family of plantation owners who lived in La Plaine du Cul-de-Sac, a rural lowland outside of Port-au-Prince, at that time.

St. Méry’s transcription notes that the Creole lyrics were set to Que ne suis-je la fougère, a famous French tune. This melody is now attributed to the Italian composer and sopranist Antoine Albanèse (1729–1800), who lived in France. It too has had a circuitous and opaque history since it took over French salons in the 1750s. Listen to another colonial adaptation: the beloved Lebanese Catholic hymn Wahabibi.

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What kind of song is this?

Through a European lens, Lisette comes from a popular song tradition in eighteenth-century French culture called the air de salon. These songs were primarily sung in homes by amateur musicians, often upper-class women. Think of that scene from Pride & Prejudice where Elizabeth Bennet sings for her guests. Thematically, this air de salon is a pastorale. Pastorales are a historical genre of songs and theatrical works about love set in the countryside. Think of L’Elisir d’amore, or, closer to Lisette, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Le Devin du village, which was popular in opera houses all over Saint-Domingue.

To complicate matters more, Lisette is also a contrafactum, or song parody. This means that the lyrics borrow a tune that already existed. Songs you may recognize in this genre include “Danny Boy” and the popular Haitian hymn “Men yon bèl istwa.” But Lisette doesn’t just borrow its tune. Thematically, its lyrics adapt the European pastorale to the context of Saint-Domingue, replacing its languishing shepherds with two enslaved lovers: their anxieties, customs, and proverbs.

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Through a Haitian lens, Lisette also recalls love songs written by Haitian courtesans known as cocottes. Cocotte is a nineteenth-century term for prostitute. In Saint-Domingue, it described a broad category of sexually and socially marginal women, from prostitutes to higher-class mistresses. These mixed-race and Black women existed on the fringes of polite society, while also shaping its erotic and musical tastes. Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata offers a useful European comparison, though in a very different context. But I digress.

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These women wrote songs whose lyrics survive without the music. They would be performed both in private and in social spaces, such as taverns or brothels. Literary historian Deborah Jenson points out that French colonists regularly adapted work from Black sources without crediting the original authors. She argues that surviving lyrics of songs written by cocottes suggest that Lisette’s lyrics could well have come from an already existing popular Black tune.

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Takeaway

Lisette quitté la plaine’s roots are a classic example of how archives can be incomplete or, at worst, misleading, particularly in the case of Black colonial history. Colonial archives mostly tell one side of a complicated story from the perspective of European writers deeply invested in devaluing Black life. The song’s link to the French air de salon and pastorale genres is clear, given its later adaptation in French salons. But because it resembles a more local genre on an island that was predominantly Black, where white interlocutors regularly adapted local content without any compulsion to give credit, we must speculate about its origins.

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Bonus: Que ne suis-je en Hayti

Albanèse’s infamous tune reappears in early nineteenth-century Haiti, this time as a clever ode to Prince Victor Henri, the youngest son of King Henri Christophe, penned by the statesman and opera librettist Juste Chanlatte, Comte de Rosiers. This aria comes from his pastiche opera L’Entrée du roi en sa capitale.

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Hayti ! pour ta parure
Cueille les plus belles fleurs ;
Victor est de ta verdure
L’image chère à nos cœurs.
De son père, en héritage,
Il a les dons réunis.
C’est de Mars l’air, le courage
Sous les attraits d’Adonis.

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At the time this was written, Haiti, often spelled Hayti, was divided into two countries: the Kingdom of Hayti, 1811–1820, in the north, and the Republic of Haiti, 1806–1820, in the south. The Lisette Project collaborator Henry Stoll, who studies the music of early post-revolutionary Haiti, shared this song parody with us, among many others written in honor of the royal family. 

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