Amy Wilentz

Toussaint Louverture: the true hero of Haiti

Sudhir Hazareesingh describes how the brave rebel defied Napoleon to lead history’s only successful revolution by an enslaved population

Toussaint Louverture. Credit: Alamy

In Haiti you have to be careful which founding father you admire. The average Haitian will think first of Toussaint Louverture when talking about their island’s revolt against France in the late 18th century, and about the original idea of a full-fledged Black republic: Toussaint the stable, the intense, the military genius, courageous, careful. But for others, the real hero of the revolution is Jean-Jacques Dessalines, or Papa Dessalines, who is said to have connived with the French to remove Toussaint from power.

Once France had exiled Toussaint, Dessalines turned on the French, rejecting their ‘peace’ and authority. He prosecuted the revolution to its bloody end, but without the restraint that Toussaint had often demanded from his fighters. Koupe tet, boule kay was Dessalines’ slogan: cut off their heads and burn down their houses. It was Dessalines who finally routed Napoleon, forcing the French to abandon their richest West Indian colony and, by extension, Louisiana. Yet the story of Toussaint Louverture is the one that has captured the world’s imagination, because from the top of the Black military structure he put his thoughts, plans and demands down on paper, unlike Dessalines.

Every Toussaint biographer has to look for ways into a narrative that won’t feel painfully familiar, and come to a reckoning with their subject’s legacy. For Black Spartacus, Sudhir Hazareesingh did much of his research in the French archives, where so many revolutionary documents are preserved — including Toussaint’s letters to various French officials, commissioners and republican organisations. His way into the story is through Toussaint’s military adventures and, more importantly, through his catlike politics.

It’s a narrative of dismissals and rejections, as our hero sweeps the way clear for his own trajectory, dispatching French officials right and left and sending them home with high-handed stabs in the back, thus ensuring that none could ever become more powerful than he.

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