Jonathas Granville
Pierre Joseph Marie Granville, known as Jonathas Granville (1785–1839) was a Haitian educator, legal expert, soldier and a diplomat. He was born a free mulatto in Saint-Domingue. He was a musician and poet, skilled swordsman, an experienced diplomat, and civil servant. From about 1806 to 1815, Granville served under Napoleon as a junior officer during the emperor's campaigns in Germany, France, and Austria. After the Bourbon Restoration, he returned to Haiti with his mother and sisters where he quickly entered in the service of Alexandre Pétion's government. In 1824 he visited the United States, to promote the emigration of free Blacks to Haiti. At his return, in 1825, he established a private school, which will become known as the Granville Institute, before being asked to lead the National Lycee in Port-au-Prince. He is considered to be the intellectual father of the 1843 Revolution that finally dislodged Jean-Pierre Boyer's authoritarian regime. Granville was regarded as well-educated and refined, a man of knowledge and virtue. He made popular in the U.S. the Persian saying, "I write insults on sand and favours on marble." Early life Granville's parents were Marie-Thérèse-Anne Labrosse and Simon Peter Granville. He was born in Sainte-Anne, a borough of Port-de-Paix, on December 5, 1785. His father was a French tutor to Toussaint Louverture's sons and his mother was a mulâtresse native of Jean-Rabel. Education and military experience in France According to the sketchy biography his son wrote about him, Granville went to France as a teenager at the time when the French Revolution was moving toward a more conservative strike, but Napoleon was not yet emperor. His son wrote, "It was in 1799 at the beginning of the deplorable division of the Governor General Toussaint Louverture and Rigaud, that by order of the Executive Board, he was sent to France with other young people for their education. He'll barely thirteen and a half." Louis Joseph Janvier wrote that Granville was one of the first young men from Saint-Domingue that Sonthonax sent to Europe for Education. On February 20, 1806, after completing his studies at the National Institute des Colonies (former Collège de la Marche) and trying out medicine for a while, Granville enlisted in the Napoleonic army. Janvier wrote that he was one of the survivors of the Battle of Leipzig and that he received the "La Croix pour sa belle conduite" (Cross for his gallant conduct). Granville, while in the U.S. referred to his years in France when he, with dignity, led whites, in their own country, into battle. Family Returning to Haiti, Jonathas Granville married Louise Sarasin, a cousin of President Boyer, on November 24, 1817, in Port-au-Prince Haiti. He had two children: Anne Victoire Jonathine (1818) and Henri Theodore Granville (1825). His son Henri would later publish works about his father and his work in Haiti. Henri included in the volume letters written between Boyer and his father as well as personal notes of Granville. Immigration plans When Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer, in collaboration with Joseph