Jean Price-Mars

Louis Jean Antoine Price-Mars was born on the fifteenth of October 1876 at Grande-Rivière-du-Nord, in the northern district of the Republic of Haiti, the son of a Haitian-Protestant working-class household of the closing years of the nineteenth century. He was raised in the Haitian-Protestant working-class community of post-Reconstruction Grande-Rivière-du-Nord.

He was placed at the Lycée Pétion at Port-au-Prince — the principal Port-au-Prince public secondary school of the post-independence Haiti — and at sixteen took up the medical study at the Sorbonne and at the Paris-École de Médecine from 1899 to 1903 — among the early Black-Caribbean medical graduates of the Paris-École de Médecine.

He returned to Haiti in 1903 and entered the Haitian diplomatic service in 1908 as the Haitian First Secretary at the Legation at Berlin. He served the Berlin Legation from 1908 to 1909 and the Haitian Minister to Washington from 1909 to 1911.

He served as the Haitian Minister to Paris from 1915 to 1917 — across the closing months of the First World War. He returned to Haiti in 1917 and was the principal Haitian-Senator from the Northern Department from 1922 to 1928.

He published in 1928 the principal monograph of his career — Ainsi parla l’Oncle — at the principal Port-au-Prince publisher of the period. The Price-Mars monograph was the principal foundational text of the post-1928 Haitian Indigenist movement — the principal post-United-States-Occupation Haitian intellectual-and-political-and-cultural rejection of the principal European-and-American assimilationist Haitian elite-and-mulatto programme of the closing years of the nineteenth century.

Ainsi parla l’Oncle was an ethnographic-and-anthropological argument that the Haitian-Africanist popular-cultural tradition — the principal Haitian Vodou religion, the principal Haitian-Creole language, and the principal Haitian-Africanist popular-and-political culture — was the principal foundation of the Haitian national-identity. The work was at the time of publication and remains the principal foundational text of the Haitian Indigenist movement of the post-1928 period.

He was the principal foundational figure of the Haitian Society of History and Geography — founded at Port-au-Prince in 1923 — and served as the Society’s president from 1923 to 1942.

He stood unsuccessfully for the Haitian presidency in 1930 and 1946.

He was named in 1953 the Haitian Permanent Representative to the United Nations at New York — among the early Black-Caribbean senior diplomats of the post-war United Nations period.

He was the principal foundational figure of the principal post-war Haitian-and-Pan-African intellectual programmes of the closing years of the colonial period and the opening years of the post-colonial period — including the personal mentorship of Aimé Césaire (placed in this archive), Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon-Gontran Damas (placed in this archive) at the closing years of the 1930s and the principal years of the 1940s Pan-African Manifestos at Paris.

He died at Pétion-Ville, Haiti on the first of March 1969 of natural causes, at ninety-two.

He is honored here as the founder of Haitian Indigenism.