One of the many ironies of the life of Toussaint Louverture is that he was a governor of a French colony who never set foot in France, until he was imprisoned in the Jura mountains shortly before his death.
“There is no man,” wrote Charles Vincent, who served as an emissary for Louverture, “more attached to the ideal of French republicanism.” Louverture’s loyalty to—and his interpretation of—the French Revolution’s call for liberté, égalité, fraternité is clear throughout Sudhir Hazareesingh’s engaging biography of the former slave who became governor of Saint-Domingue, on what is now known as Haiti. Louverture did not accept the promise of the revolution at face value but, as Hazareesingh shows, “his ideas were shaped through his own reasoning, and combined Saint-Domingue’s revolutionary tradition with his own.”
The timing of this book is fortuitous. In a year of Black Lives Matter protests over police brutality, the story of Louverture’s rise and fall is a poignant reminder that the promise of true liberty, equality and brotherhood in the 18th century remains unfulfilled in the democracies of today.
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Hazareesingh, whose other works examine the mythology around two towering French historical figures, Charles de Gaulle and Napoleon Bonaparte, starts Black Spartacus in a similar vein, by discussing how Louverture has been written about, both during his life and in the two centuries since his death. For some, he was the “black George Washington,” while others decried him as the “Robespierre of Saint-Domingue.” Within Haiti, it is Louverture’s successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who is considered the real father of the nation, after his routing of the French in 1803.
Hazareesingh’s aim is to “find our way back to Toussaint… to try to see the world through his eyes, and to recapture the boldness of his thinking and the individuality of his voice.” He is exhaustive in this mission, mining deep into French, Spanish and British archives. The result is a vivid portrait of a complex, captivating and sometimes contradictory leader.
While Louverture admired Enlightenment thinkers—he certainly knew of the prediction of a “Black Spartacus” in Guillaume-Thomas Raynal and Denis Diderot’s Histoire des deux Indes—he eschewed the anti-clericalism of the time, remaining a fervent Catholic his entire life, and also participating in vodou practices. It is this creole combination—a blend of European, African and Caribbean cultures—that is key to understanding Louverture.
Although little is known about Louverture’s early life, he would have undoubtedly been influenced by the many forces at work in the 18th-century Atlantic world. Saint-Domingue was a French colony created on the island of Hispaniola, where Columbus had landed in 1492. The western third had been ceded to France in 1697, and by the time of the French Revolution in 1789, Saint-Domingue had a population of some 500,000 enslaved Africans.
Louverture was born into slavery sometime between 1736 and 1746 on the Bréda sugar estate, where his parents were enslaved, near the northern city of Cap Haïtien, in a region dominated by cane fields. As was customary, he was given the surname of the plantation: Bréda. Louverture—l’ouverture, or the opening—came later.
His father was captured and enslaved in the 1730s in West Africa, near today’s Benin. He was an Allada, the second largest group among enslaved people on Saint-Domingue, and considered excellent warriors. Such African roots were not unusual—by 1790, more than half the enslaved people in Saint-Domingue were bossales, or African-born, with the rest being, like Louverture, island-born creoles.
Louverture had acquired his freedom by 1776, and recently unearthed records show that he owned at least one slave and rented a coffee plantation with another 13 enslaved workers between 1779 and 1781. He also chose to live on the Brèda plantation, despite being free, another apparently contradictory position, but to Hazareesingh his decision was influenced by the fact that other members of his family were still enslaved and he wanted to continue to live among them.
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By the time of the French Revolution, Louverture would have been somewhere between 43 and 53, hardly an auspicious age to begin a military career. In addition, he was skinny and short, having suffered a sickly childhood. However, he had become one of the best horsemen on the island, a skill that would serve him well.
In August 1793, he announced his intentions with his Camp Turel proclamation: “I am Toussaint Louverture, you have perhaps heard my name. You are aware, brothers, that I have undertaken vengeance, and that I want freedom and equality to reign in Saint-Domingue.”
He had discarded the plantation name and taken a new one, and whatever his past incongruities, he now singularly dedicated himself to the struggle—and the opportunities—at hand. By this point, the colony was in disarray. The white community of about 40,000 was divided between royalists and republicans. The similarly sized population of free people of colour had been demanding equal rights from France. Although many were wealthy slave owners, they had been forced to endure social and political restrictions, such as not being allowed to hold administrative posts or buy luxury goods. Then, in 1791, a slave revolt began. There is a great deal of mystery around where Louverture was in these years. Had he been involved in the insurgency? He knew all the leaders, and he briefly led a band of runaway slaves in 1792. However, the following year he decided to join the Spanish auxiliary forces in neighbouring Santo Domingo, who were now fighting French troops in Saint-Domingue, in part because the Spanish (who retained slaves of their own) had offered to liberate any enslaved combatants.
He became a general and led some 4,000 men in the successful capture of parts of northern Saint-Domingue. In that same year, British forces arrived, using the invitation by panicked white slave planters as a pretext to serve their own designs of taking control of the island.
Surrounded by British and Spanish troops, and with an ongoing slave revolt, the Saint-Domingue authorities abolished slavery in 1793. Louverture, though wary, returned to the French camp the following year, shortly before the island received the news that the French National Convention had ratified abolition.
Hazareesingh details Louverture’s rise with great energy, drawing a portrait of a general who was in constant motion, either on his horse or wearing out his five secretaries with streams of letters. He had to be many things to many people, all the while crafting his own version of what Hazareesingh calls his “creole republicanism.”
He had enemies, not least André Rigaud, a mixed-race commander in the south of the island. Their rivalry resulted in the internecine War of Knives (1799-1800), which Louverture won. Many white settlers and French officials backed Louverture because they needed him to convince the freed slaves to work. The promised pay was a meagre quarter of the crop share, and the take-up was low, so Louverture resorted to coercive measures. His reluctance to break up the plantations highlights both his pragmatism and his contradictions. He wanted to keep the large landowners onside—and he and his inner circle had also acquired thousands of acres of land themselves. Louverture believed that the white planters—with their access to capital—were crucial to improve the island’s economic fortunes, on which the effective freedom of half a million people depended. In addition, he knew the island needed to export its goods, and to that end he negotiated for the resumption of trade with the US despite its embargo on French products, with the resulting exemption known as the “Toussaint clause.” While sugar and coffee output did increase, many workers ran away.
Throughout this period, the shrewd Louverture negotiated with foreign powers and outsmarted the French governors who were meant to be giving him orders, until he finally—in 1800—secured the post of governor himself. It is at this point that Louverture’s downfall begins, in part because of his desire to control Spanish Santo Domingo, and in part due to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Santo Domingo had technically been ceded to France under the Treaty of Basle in 1795, but the French had yet to take possession. Of particular concern to Louverture were the reports of people being kidnapped in areas under Spanish control and sold into bondage. The Spanish still had not abolished slavery in any of their territories, and Louverture thought his people could be threatened by unscrupulous border-crossing agents. Although it was against the wishes of his superiors, Louverture arrived in Santo Domingo in January 1801 with 10,000 men and a promise to free any enslaved people.
His next goal was to craft an island-wide constitution. By this point, his accomplishments since 1794 had been staggering, as Hazareesingh neatly compresses: “Having expelled foreign [British] troops from the colony, established his military authority as commander-in-chief, subjugated the southern rebellion, neutered and then dismissed successive French envoys, outflanked the Spanish authorities in Santo Domingo and united the entire island of Hispaniola under French republican rule, Toussaint was now embarking upon his boldest venture yet: a new constitution.”
There has been much speculation about Louverture’s motivation for writing a constitution; for Hazareesingh, it was to help insulate the island—and its hard-won freedom—from the political instability he could see on the horizon in France. He affirmed his loyalty to the nation and allied it to the cause of liberty in the constitution’s third article: “All men are born, live and die free and French.” However, in Article 28, Louverture made himself governor for life, leading to charges of authoritarianism. But whatever his motivations, Napoleon considered the entire affair an act of insubordination. Louverture had written to Napoleon, and when a reply finally did arrive, it was accompanied by a military expedition sent to oust him—and reinstate slavery. Louverture was arrested and put on a ship to France, where he died in 1803. However, his dream of freedom for the people of Saint-Domingue did not. Dessalines, who had been one of Louverture’s key generals, led a bloody fight to the finish, establishing the nation of Haiti on 1st January 1804.
The final chapter and epilogue discuss Louverture’s fascinating afterlife. His image has been used in many ways, including being invoked by leaders of other slave uprisings in the 19th century and appearing as a symbol in the modern anti-colonial struggle. He was the subject of poems (Wordsworth paid tribute to his “unconquerable mind”), plays, paintings and novels, making him, Hazareesingh says, “the first black superhero of the modern age.”
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Certainly, his physical exploits seem superhuman, but Louverture’s true power may have been his devotion to a radical version of liberty and equality, an interpretation that perhaps could have only been forged in the Caribbean. Who could better understand the meaning of freedom than a person born into slavery? Louverture spoke often of his loyalty to France, but it really lay with the people of the island. His actions gave a much deeper meaning to the promise of the French Revolution, and his words did too: “We are not looking for a circumstantial freedom, conceded just to us: we want the recognition of the principle that any man, be he red, black or white, cannot be the property of another man.”
But in the mountain Fort de Joux, the weight of what he endured was clear. In a final memoir, Louverture asked: “did my colour ever prevent me from serving my fatherland with zeal and loyalty? Does the colour of my skin get in the way of my honour and my bravery?” Louverture tried to embody the highest ideals of the French Revolution; for this he paid with his life.
Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture (£25, Allen Lane)by Sudhir Hazareesingh
