The sense of place in Firmin’s Monsieur Roosevelt, Président des États-Unis et de la République d’Haïti

Firmin’s work is the subject of numerous studies and is taken up through various points of entry. But, until now, the link between his work and geography has rarely been addressed, even though his use of a geographical lexicon, to weaken Gobineau’s thesis or to revisit the history of the United States from its beginnings, has consistently been a feature of his writing. To a certain degree the geographical spirit that inhabits his work has been rendered abstract by the existing literature. This applies not only to the geographical concepts mobilized in Firmin’s work, but also the position of and curiosity about geographers that animate his writing. This chapter aims to shed light on the contours of Firmin’s geographic notion of culture by highlighting the different meanings represented by the places he evokes.