This article looks at the origin of narratives on the Haitian Revolution in the context of competing narrations of slavery and abolition. I argue that the first texts written by white settlers and survivors of slave rebellion take part in the constitution of a cultural memory and bear witness to a process of remembering that includes forgetting and transformation, while it lays out lines of the unspeakable. These texts – historiographic accounts, testimonial and fugitive narratives – constitute

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... a pool of narratives and anecdotes nourishing the modes and figures of remembering effective until the 20th century. Although competing communities of memory create competing narratives, something like a shared canon of figures and narrations emerges. Through a diachronic reading of different texts that visualizes processes of transformation, the reader is able to trace the ways in which a binding frame of memory is constituted.